6 ms·

Google One VPN will be discontinued

50 points by raizer88 2y ago

nikolay 2y ago
One less incentive to pay for Google One, I guess!
raizer88 2y ago
Another one bites the dust.
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
I’m convinced the Google treadmill of products that are created, shut down, and recreated is due to a promotion oriented culture. They must be getting rewarded for launches, not for building useful products or successful businesses.
- Arnt 2y ago
  Rumour has it that it's easy to get a bonus or raise for a new something, hard if you work on maintaining something. The new something doesn't need to be totally new, though. But to be fair: In an organisation where your product is going to be compared against Adwords, your product will seem insignificant and irrelevant, and that's not because of how your team works on the product, and it's noe because of how the organisation does the comparison.
- Havoc 2y ago
  The other explanation I’ve seen is that the 20% time leads to lots of small products without much of an overarching biz strategy
  - snotrockets 2y ago
    20% time was also killed by Google (even if not officially)
    - rhmw2b 2y ago
      Yeah it’s effectively dead. Also referred to as 120% time.
jqpabc123 2y ago
Everything Google does has privacy invasion baked into it. So it's really kinda insulting for them to offer a product where the central purpose is to provide *privacy*. Apparently, the public is not quite as dumb as they thought.
- lxgr 2y ago
  I think this was actually a somewhat compelling product: Sure, Google tracks users where they can, but for this they were explicitly claiming to be using authentication via blinded signature tokens, and to not log any traffic. Google has a lot more to lose from a privacy or breach of contract lawsuit than a random shady VPN operation that can just disappear when word gets out that they're actually feeding everything to data brokers, and open shop under a different name the next day.
  - jqpabc123 2y ago
    * ... authentication via blinded signature tokens* Hand waving, smoke and mirrors. When the authentication and the service are both run by the same company on their servers, a huge potential exists for there to be nothing really "blind" about. As many, many examples show; Google = Privacy Invasion. It's way too late for them to try and establish privacy credibility.
    - lxgr 2y ago
      The blind signing part runs locally on your VPN client. > It's way too late for them to try and establish privacy credibility. I personally don't think it's a good idea to trust any corporation to be a good or bad custodian of your personal data based on their public image or even past actions. These values can change very quickly, especially in publicly-traded corporations. What matters much more than self-proclaimed statements or public perception are economic incentives, and I believe Google has quite strong incentives to not get hit by huge fines for violating the GDPR and other privacy regulations.
sander1095 2y ago
This impacts me quite a bit as I use this often. I pay for Google One for the extra storage and VPN. Now the VPN is going away but my costs will stay the same. That's absurd to me.
- soraminazuki 2y ago
  If this wasn't clear before, it's now clear that Google services are unreliable even if they're paid.
PedroBatista 2y ago
I don’t know if it’s just bad management or they want to stay out any possible antitrust case. Because with their weight Google could easily make this a multi million “small” business. Either way, it’s good they leave some for the next guy to earn. ( not because the goodness of their heart I’m sure )
- pschuegr 2y ago
  I'm pretty sure that for Google a "multi-million" sized venture is considered a complete waste of time; they probably don't consider it worth pursuing until it hits the hundreds of millions. The scale they operate at financially is beyond comprehensible. I imagine its frustrating to be working on these projects which would mean untold riches to any individual or small group but having it get shut down because it's not making a half billion or so.
- xnx 2y ago
  One billion+ users is the size of market that Google is interested in
lxgr 2y ago
> Google is now “discontinuing the VPN feature as [they] found people simply weren’t using it.” [...] > Meanwhile, there are no changes to the free Pixel VPN introduced with the Pixel 7 series in 2022. Ah yes, nobody is using it, so Google is saving cost by... discontinuing it for paying services customers, but continuing to provide it to hardware customers (that actually don't pay per month for it). Makes total sense.
Jezebelley 2y ago
[dead]
kkarakk 2y ago
The service didn't even work if you signed up for google one from most of the world and then they discontinue it coz of low usage? Pretty funny stuff
- lxgr 2y ago
  To be fair, there are some legal implications to providing VPNs in many countries, since they're effectively making you look a lot like an ISP from a legal and practical point of view. Google isn't a random fly-by-night VPN operator that can just ignore subpoenas and takedown notices, so they probably did some cost-reward analysis per country before offering it there. They could have bypassed some (but probably not all) of that by offering cross-country VPN nodes, but I suspect that given their size they didn't want to get into the business of "jurisdiction shopping", nor did they have any interest in landing on various media companies' "geo-bypassing VPN IP range" block lists.
- taco_emoji 2y ago
  It was so half-assed to begin with.
taco_emoji 2y ago
Not shocking. Their VPN app sucked ass. A) it randomly disconnected several times a day, and B) it had no "kill switch" option which would block all traffic when the VPN went down. So my connection was frequently unprotected throughout the day.
- lxgr 2y ago
  Yeah, their client was pretty bad, especially on macOS where it would sometimes get borked in a way that needed a full OS reboot to start working again.
- nytesky 2y ago
  I can’t remember, but didn’t it require the Android Google One app to do VPN on Chromebooks? I remember it being hard to setup, but perhaps I’m misremembering my journey through dodgy VPN clients.
  - taco_emoji 2y ago
    Not sure. I only used it on Windows
- K0IN 2y ago
  on android there is a Killswitch.
politelemon 2y ago
I wonder what their marketing is thinking about this. Google One is effectively just Google Drive storage with some feature add-ons. Until now, that VPN was their only 'additional' thing in the package. Without the VPN it's just a few enhancements to existing products that aren't compelling enough.
shanemhansen 2y ago
I think it's 50/50 whether or not I believe the reasoning. One one hand: killing a product for not being multi billion user multi billion dollar overnight success is incredibly on brand. On the other hand: I 100% believe that they just found government pushback too burdensome to comply with. That would match what I saw when I worked there.
unsignedint 2y ago
I somewhat anticipated the discontinuation of Google VPN because Google didn't address the issue of DNS hijacking, particularly on their Windows client. Ironically, this unresolved issue is why I stopped using their service. [0]: https://github.com/google/vpn-libraries/issues/36 https://github.com/google/vpn-libraries/issues/36
brevitea 2y ago
One less predatory service to worry about.

50 points by raizer88 2y ago

nikolay 2y ago

One less incentive to pay for Google One, I guess!

raizer88 2y ago

Another one bites the dust.

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago

I’m convinced the Google treadmill of products that are created, shut down, and recreated is due to a promotion oriented culture. They must be getting rewarded for launches, not for building useful products or successful businesses.

Arnt 2y ago
Rumour has it that it's easy to get a bonus or raise for a new something, hard if you work on maintaining something. The new something doesn't need to be totally new, though. But to be fair: In an organisation where your product is going to be compared against Adwords, your product will seem insignificant and irrelevant, and that's not because of how your team works on the product, and it's noe because of how the organisation does the comparison.
Havoc 2y ago
The other explanation I’ve seen is that the 20% time leads to lots of small products without much of an overarching biz strategy
- snotrockets 2y ago
  20% time was also killed by Google (even if not officially)
  - rhmw2b 2y ago
    Yeah it’s effectively dead. Also referred to as 120% time.

jqpabc123 2y ago

Everything Google does has privacy invasion baked into it. So it's really kinda insulting for them to offer a product where the central purpose is to provide *privacy*. Apparently, the public is not quite as dumb as they thought.

lxgr 2y ago
I think this was actually a somewhat compelling product: Sure, Google tracks users where they can, but for this they were explicitly claiming to be using authentication via blinded signature tokens, and to not log any traffic. Google has a lot more to lose from a privacy or breach of contract lawsuit than a random shady VPN operation that can just disappear when word gets out that they're actually feeding everything to data brokers, and open shop under a different name the next day.
- jqpabc123 2y ago
  * ... authentication via blinded signature tokens* Hand waving, smoke and mirrors. When the authentication and the service are both run by the same company on their servers, a huge potential exists for there to be nothing really "blind" about. As many, many examples show; Google = Privacy Invasion. It's way too late for them to try and establish privacy credibility.
  - lxgr 2y ago
    The blind signing part runs locally on your VPN client. > It's way too late for them to try and establish privacy credibility. I personally don't think it's a good idea to trust any corporation to be a good or bad custodian of your personal data based on their public image or even past actions. These values can change very quickly, especially in publicly-traded corporations. What matters much more than self-proclaimed statements or public perception are economic incentives, and I believe Google has quite strong incentives to not get hit by huge fines for violating the GDPR and other privacy regulations.

sander1095 2y ago

This impacts me quite a bit as I use this often. I pay for Google One for the extra storage and VPN. Now the VPN is going away but my costs will stay the same. That's absurd to me.

soraminazuki 2y ago
If this wasn't clear before, it's now clear that Google services are unreliable even if they're paid.

PedroBatista 2y ago

I don’t know if it’s just bad management or they want to stay out any possible antitrust case. Because with their weight Google could easily make this a multi million “small” business. Either way, it’s good they leave some for the next guy to earn. ( not because the goodness of their heart I’m sure )

pschuegr 2y ago
I'm pretty sure that for Google a "multi-million" sized venture is considered a complete waste of time; they probably don't consider it worth pursuing until it hits the hundreds of millions. The scale they operate at financially is beyond comprehensible. I imagine its frustrating to be working on these projects which would mean untold riches to any individual or small group but having it get shut down because it's not making a half billion or so.
xnx 2y ago
One billion+ users is the size of market that Google is interested in

lxgr 2y ago

> Google is now “discontinuing the VPN feature as [they] found people simply weren’t using it.” [...] > Meanwhile, there are no changes to the free Pixel VPN introduced with the Pixel 7 series in 2022. Ah yes, nobody is using it, so Google is saving cost by... discontinuing it for paying services customers, but continuing to provide it to hardware customers (that actually don't pay per month for it). Makes total sense.

Jezebelley 2y ago

[dead]

kkarakk 2y ago

The service didn't even work if you signed up for google one from most of the world and then they discontinue it coz of low usage? Pretty funny stuff

lxgr 2y ago
To be fair, there are some legal implications to providing VPNs in many countries, since they're effectively making you look a lot like an ISP from a legal and practical point of view. Google isn't a random fly-by-night VPN operator that can just ignore subpoenas and takedown notices, so they probably did some cost-reward analysis per country before offering it there. They could have bypassed some (but probably not all) of that by offering cross-country VPN nodes, but I suspect that given their size they didn't want to get into the business of "jurisdiction shopping", nor did they have any interest in landing on various media companies' "geo-bypassing VPN IP range" block lists.
taco_emoji 2y ago
It was so half-assed to begin with.

taco_emoji 2y ago

Not shocking. Their VPN app sucked ass. A) it randomly disconnected several times a day, and B) it had no "kill switch" option which would block all traffic when the VPN went down. So my connection was frequently unprotected throughout the day.

lxgr 2y ago
Yeah, their client was pretty bad, especially on macOS where it would sometimes get borked in a way that needed a full OS reboot to start working again.
nytesky 2y ago
I can’t remember, but didn’t it require the Android Google One app to do VPN on Chromebooks? I remember it being hard to setup, but perhaps I’m misremembering my journey through dodgy VPN clients.
- taco_emoji 2y ago
  Not sure. I only used it on Windows
K0IN 2y ago
on android there is a Killswitch.

politelemon 2y ago

I wonder what their marketing is thinking about this. Google One is effectively just Google Drive storage with some feature add-ons. Until now, that VPN was their only 'additional' thing in the package. Without the VPN it's just a few enhancements to existing products that aren't compelling enough.

shanemhansen 2y ago

I think it's 50/50 whether or not I believe the reasoning. One one hand: killing a product for not being multi billion user multi billion dollar overnight success is incredibly on brand. On the other hand: I 100% believe that they just found government pushback too burdensome to comply with. That would match what I saw when I worked there.

unsignedint 2y ago

I somewhat anticipated the discontinuation of Google VPN because Google didn't address the issue of DNS hijacking, particularly on their Windows client. Ironically, this unresolved issue is why I stopped using their service. [0]: https://github.com/google/vpn-libraries/issues/36 https://github.com/google/vpn-libraries/issues/36

brevitea 2y ago

One less predatory service to worry about.