The world’s 3rd most popular domain registrar has been sold to Squarespace – but Google didn’t notify customers just yet. When could this happen, and why is Google silent?
I’m still in disbelief having heard this for the first time today.
Squarespace announced today it has entered into a definitive asset purchase agreement with Google, whereby Squarespace will acquire the assets associated with the Google Domains business, which will be winding down following a transition period. This purchase includes approximately 10 million domains hosted on Google Domains spread across millions of customers.
A few years ago I hit a point where the Google graveyard got so large that I no longer trust them with any of my stuff. I know the mantra is to always have multiple backups of important stuff, but I’ve started doing Google drive, OneDrive, iCloud, AND local (own cloud) copies of stuff because you just never know when Google is going to decide to kill Google maps or Google photos or whatever.
This is so frustrating, I knew that I should never trust google but i still fell for the slickness and how easy it is to administrate domains on google domains so I’ve been buying all my domains through them… I really really gotta learn to stop trusting google and basically never use their products.
The article covers this a little bit, but I thought I’d share my email response from Google when I asked them “how can I prevent Squarespace from receiving any of my data?” They responded with:
Based on the summary you have shared, I understand that you need help with your general inquiry about the Google Domains transition to Squarespace. To answer this, if you will be transferring your domains out of Google, all of the data will also be removed. This means that once the transition between Squarespace and Google happens, your data will also be removed.
I responded to this and basically said, that wording is ambiguous. Will my data be removed before or after the transition? They replied:
I’m sorry for the confusion. To be clear, Squarespace will not receive any of your Google Domains data. Only the active domain names, excluding the domain names that have been deleted or transferred out, will be affected by the data shift to Squarespace.
So if I trust their word, it means, if I’ve already transferred out my domains (which I have), Squarespace shouldn’t receive any of my customer information, or even have a record of who I am. Hopefully that’s true.
It clearly reads as autogenerated reply. It seems ambiguous to me still whether it’s thinking you’re trying to move your domains to squarespace and wondering if google sill keep data or if it’s about them moving domains to squarespace.
Though I’m general I’d assume if you move all your domains out of Google Domains before the transition, there shouldn’t be anything for them to transfer to squarespace.
I didn’t put my actual inquiry in the comment since it would have made it too long. But I wasn’t asking them about moving to Squarespace, I was very clear that I am burning a bridge with both of them and have no interest in being a customer of either of them. I told them I’ve already moved my domains out of Google Domains, and I wanted to clarify if any historical data about me and my domains (domain ownership history, purchase history, receipts, etc) would go to Squarespace. And they replied with what I put in my comment.
If I consider their reply to me, and the stuff I’m reading in the link OP posted, this isn’t really a “transition,” Squarespace is just buying the rights to all 10M+ domains Google Domains owns. But if Google Domains doesn’t own a domain anymore, it won’t be part of that transaction.
That’s what I gathered, anyway. Hopefully they can be less ambiguous before the transaction actually happens. It will probably take the better part of a year, so there is plenty of time.
Most times companies do acquisitions just because they want to get a patent, or just hire the dev team with specific skills. The product for them was worthless from the beginning,
To be slightly fair a decent number of those are redundant or were successfully merged into other projects while others were clearly very experimental in nature.
This product was also sold, not deleted. So to be a bit pedantic, it doesn’t belong there. People are acting like this has died entirely or they aren’t able to transfer their domains. It’s not the end of the world.
But I guess people can feel good posting “Don’t be evil I guess” over and over again (as has been posted in all the threads about this numerous times) or being all snooty about how they’ve “warned people forever” not to use any Google service ever.
Yeah, they tend to be like that… have dumped quite a few great services. Google+ was my favorite place until it was gonne. I was mostly using Reddit afterwards, and given current circumstances, I’m jumping at alternatives immediately. I at least want to be able to access them and know how they feel.
Oh man, ain’t that the truth. I really gotta make a point to get a backup of all my photos from Google Photos onto a hard drive one of these days. Problem is, Google Takeout batches only last about a week or so and I have a very hefty amount of data to get out. The alternative is to download it month by month, year by year, which I’m not looking forward to doing at all.
I did exactly that. And ever since then, I’ve been backing up my full uncompressed photographs onto several duplicate hard drives and flash drives. Plus my videos, of course. I really should set up a server so I could do all that automatically, but I don’t really know how and don’t have the energy to figure it out.
Yep… I saw this last week and transferred my domain to CloudFlare afterwards. It took me a day or two to get it all fixed back up with my iCloud stuff and other DNS crap, but it’s done now. I’m really getting sick of google killing all their products.
Same thing for me, my domains were set to renew in August, but I transferred to Hover (cloudflare didn’t directly support my tld) but I set up my nameservers with Cloudflare.
Everything google touches dies, I’m very distrustful of any of their services, I should probably think of moving off gmail too haha
Yup, that’s my backup plan if I don’t like where things are going… Funny enough, after the announcement, exactly 1 day later, Cloudlflare sent me a migrate to them ad, as one domain was close to renewal.
We’l see how prices hold out after the transfer, as well as features. If anything gets a price hike or features restricted, I’m out. Will probably move domains to CloudFlare in that circumstance.
If you trust google with absolutely anything then you are a fool. They start and close things constantly. You should 100% expect any google service you use to shutdown at any time.
Now i understand. Upper management compared the numbers to the usual numbers they see (billions of google accounts for example) and saw “what the hell? Only a dozen million domains? Literally nobody is using the service, get rid of it”
Google Fi customers beware. I’ve been saying for a while it could be next and always met with the argument “well actually it’s easy for them to run and profitable so it’s definitely safe.” By the looks of this nothing is safe besides their most core products
Seriously. They have been sending this message out for more than a decade now. Every new Google product or service that is any good will be shut down at short notice just when people start getting used to it. Only the search engine and Gmail endure.
People think Google is in the business of providing services. They aren’t. They’re in the business of data collection and their services exist to facilitate that. Useful data dries up, service shuts down, every time. It sounds harsh but people who still use Google services are just setting themselves up to get fucked over.
Google is in whatever business they decide to be, and saying that they’re expected to leave abruptly because the well dried up is not an acceptable answer. Ultimately it just tarnishes the brand and dooms whatever new things they try to venture into. Stadia never got off the ground for this very reason.
Google’s not going to be able to collect a lot of data if no one trusts them to run a service for more than a couple years. Hell, can I even trust them to keep Chromium going at this point!? Surely they won’t let that waterfall of data dry up…
Nah man, the future belongs to the people most capable of providing tools, advice and knowledge to create further data, utility, infrastructure, etc, always has been.
Google search engine was just one piece of the puzzle.
They did kill it for me. I was grandfathered into the G Suite software because I signed up back when it was free. Last year they turned around and said “we know we told you that, as an early adopter, you could have this forever; but now we’re kicking you out unless you start paying.”
And then they killed IMAP access (without oauth) moments later. Fortunately I was fast enough to set up my own mail server and copy my family’s emails, photos, documents, etc. out of Google. I haven’t trusted them since.
I’m slowly migrating to ProtonMail, but I have so many accounts, it’s kind of painful. I wish I hadn’t been so keen on making new accounts for every little thing over the years.
That’s the best part of Proton+SimpleLogin. I use a “different email” for every account for which I sign up. This allows me to know exactly who sells my info and who doesn’t, by which address starts to get spammed.
I’m actually quite pleased with what I’ve ended up with now. One of the features of the Postfix / Dovecot server I’m running now is that I have recipient delimiters - for example, if my email is hiding@aussie.zone, I can sign up for Mastodon with hiding+mastodon@aussie.zone, and everything they send me will be automatically filed into the Mastodon folder in my account. Additionally, I know exactly who is selling my data this way. It’s a great system and avoids the unfortunate predicament you currently find yourself in!
Yeah nah that’s just the places like YouTube, that they can throw the most advertising at, the issue is that they’re not muscling into any other avenues for income, e.g. Google Cloud, YouTube Music, Google Music Studios etc, shared specialised platform for music production and computing hardware, with more exclusive use of Golang tools etc, Vs AWS, a general all purpose solution.
This site is interesting… every time you reload it, the short blurb about each tool changes. Is it using a llm, or do they write alts that get served at random?
Yup. I migrated everything out of Google when they killed Listen. Was on the edge after Inbox, but Listen was the last straw. They don’t know how to keep great products alive, and I’m tired of getting suckered punched by them.
Exceptions are Android (because there’s no other options) and Angular/Golang, because they would survive being abandoned by Google. Hell, they’d probably improve!
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Been bought by square spaces.
Who are surprisingly expensive.
I’m super pissed about this.
I have a ton of client domains registered with google, and squarespace’s pricing is double.
They had by far the best platform I’ve used for managing domains. This sucks.
I’m imagine your pricing with your customers is already detailed as well.
A few years ago I hit a point where the Google graveyard got so large that I no longer trust them with any of my stuff. I know the mantra is to always have multiple backups of important stuff, but I’ve started doing Google drive, OneDrive, iCloud, AND local (own cloud) copies of stuff because you just never know when Google is going to decide to kill Google maps or Google photos or whatever.
lol, I think they are half way there with google photo. XD
This is so frustrating, I knew that I should never trust google but i still fell for the slickness and how easy it is to administrate domains on google domains so I’ve been buying all my domains through them… I really really gotta learn to stop trusting google and basically never use their products.
We can’t even trust google to run a registrar!?
I’m still amazed that they decided to do this, given how involved they are with this type of thing.
I had already moved to porkbun, but Google Sites was such an easy way to make a simple webpage with a domain.
If we are more scrutiny of vertically oriented monopolies, it may not be worth it to Google owning a registrar along with its search business.
It is a lot easier divesting the registrar.
The article covers this a little bit, but I thought I’d share my email response from Google when I asked them “how can I prevent Squarespace from receiving any of my data?” They responded with:
I responded to this and basically said, that wording is ambiguous. Will my data be removed before or after the transition? They replied:
So if I trust their word, it means, if I’ve already transferred out my domains (which I have), Squarespace shouldn’t receive any of my customer information, or even have a record of who I am. Hopefully that’s true.
This is interesting, thanks for sharing
It clearly reads as autogenerated reply. It seems ambiguous to me still whether it’s thinking you’re trying to move your domains to squarespace and wondering if google sill keep data or if it’s about them moving domains to squarespace.
Though I’m general I’d assume if you move all your domains out of Google Domains before the transition, there shouldn’t be anything for them to transfer to squarespace.
I didn’t put my actual inquiry in the comment since it would have made it too long. But I wasn’t asking them about moving to Squarespace, I was very clear that I am burning a bridge with both of them and have no interest in being a customer of either of them. I told them I’ve already moved my domains out of Google Domains, and I wanted to clarify if any historical data about me and my domains (domain ownership history, purchase history, receipts, etc) would go to Squarespace. And they replied with what I put in my comment.
If I consider their reply to me, and the stuff I’m reading in the link OP posted, this isn’t really a “transition,” Squarespace is just buying the rights to all 10M+ domains Google Domains owns. But if Google Domains doesn’t own a domain anymore, it won’t be part of that transaction.
That’s what I gathered, anyway. Hopefully they can be less ambiguous before the transaction actually happens. It will probably take the better part of a year, so there is plenty of time.
I’m fully transferred, if Squarespace gets my information as a past customer I will be frustrated.
The Google Graveyard grows ever larger. Nearly at 300 now.
This was a trip back in time, seeing things like Meebo and Picasa that G purchased and killed off. 😕
That’s just the nature of corporate pirates, they loot and plunder what they can use and integrate into their own products then scuttle the rest
Most often not even taking the things that made the plundered product great in the first place, unfortunately.
Most times companies do acquisitions just because they want to get a patent, or just hire the dev team with specific skills. The product for them was worthless from the beginning,
Yeah, this is basically their business model/modus operandi
I still miss igoogle at times
To be slightly fair a decent number of those are redundant or were successfully merged into other projects while others were clearly very experimental in nature.
This product was also sold, not deleted. So to be a bit pedantic, it doesn’t belong there. People are acting like this has died entirely or they aren’t able to transfer their domains. It’s not the end of the world.
But I guess people can feel good posting “Don’t be evil I guess” over and over again (as has been posted in all the threads about this numerous times) or being all snooty about how they’ve “warned people forever” not to use any Google service ever.
I will never trust Google for anything since they killed off Google Plus. Getting rid of “don’t be evil” as their corporate motto was a huge giveaway.
Yeah, they tend to be like that… have dumped quite a few great services. Google+ was my favorite place until it was gonne. I was mostly using Reddit afterwards, and given current circumstances, I’m jumping at alternatives immediately. I at least want to be able to access them and know how they feel.
Don’t be evil is still in one of their slogans or whatever you wanna call it but it’s just at the end like “and as always don’t be evil.”
Oh man, ain’t that the truth. I really gotta make a point to get a backup of all my photos from Google Photos onto a hard drive one of these days. Problem is, Google Takeout batches only last about a week or so and I have a very hefty amount of data to get out. The alternative is to download it month by month, year by year, which I’m not looking forward to doing at all.
I did exactly that. And ever since then, I’ve been backing up my full uncompressed photographs onto several duplicate hard drives and flash drives. Plus my videos, of course. I really should set up a server so I could do all that automatically, but I don’t really know how and don’t have the energy to figure it out.
I use Google Fi for my cell service and have loved it, but them killing off or selling so many of their products has me real nervous over here…
Yep… I saw this last week and transferred my domain to CloudFlare afterwards. It took me a day or two to get it all fixed back up with my iCloud stuff and other DNS crap, but it’s done now. I’m really getting sick of google killing all their products.
Same! I went with CF because I refuse to ever use SquareSpace because they have ads in every podcast
Same thing for me, my domains were set to renew in August, but I transferred to Hover (cloudflare didn’t directly support my tld) but I set up my nameservers with Cloudflare.
Everything google touches dies, I’m very distrustful of any of their services, I should probably think of moving off gmail too haha
Yup, that’s my backup plan if I don’t like where things are going… Funny enough, after the announcement, exactly 1 day later, Cloudlflare sent me a migrate to them ad, as one domain was close to renewal.
Was even easier for me since I was already using cloudflare as my dns for my domain so it all just stayed the same
We’l see how prices hold out after the transfer, as well as features. If anything gets a price hike or features restricted, I’m out. Will probably move domains to CloudFlare in that circumstance.
Wow, was pretty heavily bombarded by domains ads just a few weeks ago!
If you trust google with absolutely anything then you are a fool. They start and close things constantly. You should 100% expect any google service you use to shutdown at any time.
They had 10 million domains (according to the article). Even with a successful business they drop stuff. Maybe I am a fool!
only 10 million domains?
Now i understand. Upper management compared the numbers to the usual numbers they see (billions of google accounts for example) and saw “what the hell? Only a dozen million domains? Literally nobody is using the service, get rid of it”
They often shut things down that seem successful and popular. Google can’t be trusted.
Google Fi customers beware. I’ve been saying for a while it could be next and always met with the argument “well actually it’s easy for them to run and profitable so it’s definitely safe.” By the looks of this nothing is safe besides their most core products
Google: the grim reaper of online services
I mean, this is Google we’re talking about…
Don’t build on or depend on google products… That is the message they are sending
https://killedbygoogle.com/
Seriously. They have been sending this message out for more than a decade now. Every new Google product or service that is any good will be shut down at short notice just when people start getting used to it. Only the search engine and Gmail endure.
People think Google is in the business of providing services. They aren’t. They’re in the business of data collection and their services exist to facilitate that. Useful data dries up, service shuts down, every time. It sounds harsh but people who still use Google services are just setting themselves up to get fucked over.
Google is in whatever business they decide to be, and saying that they’re expected to leave abruptly because the well dried up is not an acceptable answer. Ultimately it just tarnishes the brand and dooms whatever new things they try to venture into. Stadia never got off the ground for this very reason.
Google’s not going to be able to collect a lot of data if no one trusts them to run a service for more than a couple years. Hell, can I even trust them to keep Chromium going at this point!? Surely they won’t let that waterfall of data dry up…
Nah man, the future belongs to the people most capable of providing tools, advice and knowledge to create further data, utility, infrastructure, etc, always has been.
Google search engine was just one piece of the puzzle.
RIP inbox
Oh my god let’s hope they don’t kill Gmail. At least not until I’m done migrating.
They did kill it for me. I was grandfathered into the G Suite software because I signed up back when it was free. Last year they turned around and said “we know we told you that, as an early adopter, you could have this forever; but now we’re kicking you out unless you start paying.”
And then they killed IMAP access (without oauth) moments later. Fortunately I was fast enough to set up my own mail server and copy my family’s emails, photos, documents, etc. out of Google. I haven’t trusted them since.
Grrr! I remember that! It really sucks.
I’m slowly migrating to ProtonMail, but I have so many accounts, it’s kind of painful. I wish I hadn’t been so keen on making new accounts for every little thing over the years.
That’s the best part of Proton+SimpleLogin. I use a “different email” for every account for which I sign up. This allows me to know exactly who sells my info and who doesn’t, by which address starts to get spammed.
Yeeees!!! I found out through here a few days ago that SimpleLogin existed and is teamed with Proton.
Up until recently, I had been using spamgourmet.
I’m actually quite pleased with what I’ve ended up with now. One of the features of the Postfix / Dovecot server I’m running now is that I have recipient delimiters - for example, if my email is hiding@aussie.zone, I can sign up for Mastodon with hiding+mastodon@aussie.zone, and everything they send me will be automatically filed into the Mastodon folder in my account. Additionally, I know exactly who is selling my data this way. It’s a great system and avoids the unfortunate predicament you currently find yourself in!
Same boat here, but they reversed the decision and offered a free version for personal use. more restrictive, but still offered me what I needed.
Yes you said new product now they are killing established products. This has been out for just under a decade.
Yeah nah that’s just the places like YouTube, that they can throw the most advertising at, the issue is that they’re not muscling into any other avenues for income, e.g. Google Cloud, YouTube Music, Google Music Studios etc, shared specialised platform for music production and computing hardware, with more exclusive use of Golang tools etc, Vs AWS, a general all purpose solution.
This site is interesting… every time you reload it, the short blurb about each tool changes. Is it using a llm, or do they write alts that get served at random?
Yup. I migrated everything out of Google when they killed Listen. Was on the edge after Inbox, but Listen was the last straw. They don’t know how to keep great products alive, and I’m tired of getting suckered punched by them.
Exceptions are Android (because there’s no other options) and Angular/Golang, because they would survive being abandoned by Google. Hell, they’d probably improve!
Came here to comment that — glad it was the first comment