The Dumbfounding Dropping of the 'Google Domains' Ball

Given Google's stated mission "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" and the more casual high-level one of helping to organize the web, running a domain registrar made perfect sense. While there were plenty of decent, smaller options, GoDaddy and other more frustrating (at best) and spammy (at worst) registrars hand long taken over the space. So when Google Domains launched (in beta, naturally) a decade ago, it was the proverbial glass of ice water in hell. I immediately signed up and moved all of my domains over. It was easy to use, simple, and fairly priced. A great Google product in a space where again, Google had a unique position and vantage point. A win/win.

So naturally, they shut it down.

When the shutdown was announced 18 months ago – just a little over a year after officially exiting that "beta" stage – I was completely dumbfounded. Yes, I get that it's a low-margin business. But again, there were strategic intangibles in owning this space!¹ Even worse, Google announced they would be selling off the business – and all the current domains – to Squarespace. You know, the podcast advertising company that has a side business of letting people make generic websites. Google got a whole $180M out of the deal in exchange for selling the soul of the internet.

It takes the company about four and a half hours to earn that much revenue.

Today my bafflement shifted to annoyance. While I had previously transferred a handful of my more important domains elsewhere manually ahead of Google's fire sale, I let many roll over to Squarespace. Both because it's sort of a pain to transfer domains and pure inertia (which is undoubtedly what Squarespace was banking on – $180M is worth a lot more to than than it is to Google). Anyway, there was a service tied to the email of one of the domains I let transfer over that I was trying to sign in to today for the first time in a long while (since that transfer officially happened). It's a service with one of the annoying email-only sign-in options.² And it was then that I realized I was no longer getting email to that address. And hadn't been for a year, since the transfers happened on my account.

That's because as part of the transition, any domain which had custom mail servers set up seemingly had those severed with the move. Yes, that means any of the domains I controlled which had custom email forwarding options set up under Google had not been receiving email for the past year.

I mean, I'm all for less email in normal circumstances. But... what the fuck.

To be fair, Google and Squarespace did alert me that this might occur, but I'm only seeing such alerts now. Because they were buried in the generic, boilerplate emails about the transition – which I both already knew about and also got an email about each and every domain they were porting. It looks like I read the first couple that came in, but I have a few dozen sites that were being moved. And for the few where I had this email forwarding issue, Google only threw in the following paragraph (buried under the usual couple paragraphs about the move):

Your domain XXXXX has domain forwarding and/or email forwarding services enabled. These Google Domains services will soon be discontinued. Because your domain also uses custom name servers, if you actively use these services, you’ll need to manually update your DNS records to point to the domain forwarding and/or email forwarding services provided by Squarespace.

I didn't even get any bolding or other alert signal to catch my eye. I would just have had to read every single repetitive email to catch it.³ Just wonderful support, Google. A nice swift kick in the ass on my way out the door.

So I'm currently in the process of transferring those domains that I clearly should have transferred before from Squarespace now and manually fixing the email-forwarding issues. But it will take another 24-hours or so for everything to update and migrate. Better than another year, I guess. But also, I'll never get all those emails I missed for the past year back. And again, given my longstanding hatred of email, I guess I'm okay with that. But I would have liked to make that choice myself!

We're coming up on 12 years since Google shut down Google Reader, long the go-to product mentioned in the company's long, illustrious history of shut-downs. I miss it too, and boy, how interesting might that product have been in our current age of AI? But even that one doesn't irk and confuse me as much as the end of Google Domains. A great product that Google killed for basically nothing. To save a few bucks and get a few bucks while giving up a hugely strategic position atop the web. And yes, now pissing off customers to boot.

¹ I'm reminded of when Apple exited the WiFi router space, undoubtedly for similar reasons. And now they've spent the many years after trying to re-enter the home in different capacities, with middling success.

² I do wish Ghost would give us more options too...

³ To be more fair to Squarespace, their email contained an "[Action Required]" message in the header and a note also buried in their boilerplate:

ACTION REQUIRED: Email Forwarding -- We identified that your domain uses custom nameservers and has email forwarding rules. To ensure that your rules continue to work, you need to add records to your domain before XXXXX by following these steps."

Of course, I only found this online because those emails from Squarespace went to my Gmail spam folder after I kept getting so many of them for all the transfers -- thanks again, Google!