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Ask HN: Why would Google sell Google domains to Squarespace?

112 points| alsodumb | 2 years ago | reply

I’ve been thinking about this all day and it just doesn’t make sense to me. I was hoping someone here would have a well-informed opinion/answer.

Google domains seemed like a natural tool in the GCP and Google ecosystem. It provided one-click access to setup website, Google workspace, provided direct verification in Google Search Console and Google Analytics, and just made sense.

Unlike some of the other investments like Stadia, domains is also not capital or resource intensive. They never offered discount on domains, they sold them at standard prices. The team working on domains must be small. It’s also a low risk project. Why would they kill it?

What next? They’ll sell Google Fi to T-mobile and abandon Google voice?

72 comments

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[+] petercooper|2 years ago|reply
My guess is customer support.

Domain registrars end up with a long tail of customers holding small numbers of domains. If Google sells a .com for $12, most of that goes to Verisign, and they're stuck with a customer who will get agitated when "their domain doesn't work." Many registrars use domains as a way to upsell hosting or premium domains (e.g. GoDaddy, Namecheap, Gandi) but the median Google Domains user is unlikely to be attracted to GCP.

Google dislikes having to deal with customers at scale (free users are fine as you can ignore them) and domain registration is high on the list of businesses where you end up with large amounts of customers expecting a certain level of service coupled and almost no margin to provide it.

[+] petecooper|2 years ago|reply
>My guess is customer support.

I'm inclined to agree. A one-off $12 purchase with a thin margin doesn't pay for much at the Google side. Squarespace are pretty good at support, and they have a lot of upsell potential with their core stuff.

Consider also that Google Workspace with its (presumably?) fatter monthly / annual margins also comes with pretty basic and sometimes semi-opaque support…and that's with Google controlling most or all the moving parts, with no tithe paid to the upstream domain folks.

Google Domains might have been a shortlist for tech-savvy people, but in my experience the Squarespace (and Shopify, and Wix etc) SaaS site builder crowd largely want stuff in the same place as their hosting. Pay one place for domain, DNS, platform, etc. Done.

(PS: I am not /user?id=petercooper replying to himself…)

[+] jwr|2 years ago|reply
I think your guess would be right, if it wasn't for the fact that Google has perfected the art of providing absolutely no customer support. They are experts at hiding behind walls and setting up moats. So I don't think support was a factor in this specific case.
[+] ithkuil|2 years ago|reply
AWS provides a registrar too right?

How do they handle this support issue?

Could google keep the domain registrar for GCP instead of dropping it all?

[+] wilde|2 years ago|reply
Doesn’t Google just ignore paid users too?
[+] remram|2 years ago|reply
This is probably correct but really scary because it does apply to Google Fi and Google Voice as well.
[+] topicseed|2 years ago|reply
Wouldn't the logical upsell be Google Workspace...?
[+] a_c|2 years ago|reply
This is illustrated in The Innovator's Dilemma and happens all the time. Established companies want to focus resources, increase profit margin, and improve operational efficiency. They improve their best product and sell to big customers. Not-so-successful product with not so wealthy clients got de-prioritized. They don't mind letting competitors take the market share. Why would they? It is lower margin business with low quality customers anyway. They may even sell the money losing product to competitor to milk out the last pennies.

The section "Q: Won't Big Company X just clone your product and steal all your customers?" in https://apenwarr.ca/log/20180724 also described this phenomenon

[+] pixel3234|2 years ago|reply
Good catch! If someone is interested, look into IBM, and how they create and shed divisions over decades.
[+] danpalmer|2 years ago|reply
> The team working on domains must be small

I wonder if this is true. Technology-wise, maybe, but I wonder if domains just requires a lot of negotiation and contact with registrars. I suspect it might be quite labour intensive in that way.

Additionally, to sell to consumers you need to provide services like helping people port domains for renewal, helping with DNS setup, and other consumer-level customer support, and that's expensive. If you've ever heard a Hover advert on a podcast, it sounds like an expensive business to run.

That sort of business doesn't fit with the cloud business. For cloud, sure customers will want a domain, but any business using cloud will have the ability to buy a domain, it's unlikely to be a deal breaker for using GCP, and the only up-side is $10-$100 a year on the account, that's less than a single VM for a month in many cases.

Disclaimer: I work at Google but haven't looked into this at all, this is all personal speculation as an outsider and previous customer of GCP.

[+] janosdebugs|2 years ago|reply
Having worked at a domain registrar over 10 years ago, it was a whole lot of paperwork, compliance and very little profit in it. That's why everyone is trying to sell you addon services when you buy a domain. Customer support is also an issue, there's always this one case where someone lost control over their domain that consumes a whole lot of time.
[+] thusjustin|2 years ago|reply
Google Domains != GCP Cloud Domains

One is managed at domains.google.com, the other as part of a GCP project either in the Console or via API. See https://cloud.google.com/domains/docs/register-domain

They’re selling the former.

[+] moonchrome|2 years ago|reply
I was going to say - it would be extremely stupid to not offer domain registration as a part of your cloud platform - the way billing works at most companies - not having this would often be a deal breaker for using a cloud provider.
[+] RileyJames|2 years ago|reply
Doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. While I wouldn’t have shifted my domains to google, because of exactly what has just transpired, I am considering moving everything to cloudflare for the same reason I should have moved them to google.

My domains are the starting point for my other infra/sites/web apps. And cloudflare has become that product that already sits there, dns, cdn and workers.

If google can’t sort that out, they seem dysfunctional. Cloudflare seems to understand the value and execute accordingly.

And their positioning as “at cost domains” makes it a no brainer. Only a matter of time before I move them all over.

[+] qodeninja|2 years ago|reply
the only thing keeping me from Cloudflare is the clunky email forwarding; there's also namecheap and porkbun
[+] invalidname|2 years ago|reply
Because Google is an Ad Company.

Everything else is a hobby. Holding this removes from the focus of bringing up ad revenue. We will see them get rid of a lot of these things.

[+] H8crilA|2 years ago|reply
The point is that they were also installing tracking scripts on the website, which gives them data, which is their oil that they refine into profitable ad placement.
[+] voxadam|2 years ago|reply
> and abandon Google voice?

Speaking as a long time user of Google Voice I'd say that they all but abandon it quite some time ago. Voice still mostly works but it's barely limping along. I'm slowly, one by one, getting my contacts to switch to my carrier number because I don't hold out much hope for Voice being usable product for much longer.

[+] jasonjayr|2 years ago|reply
You can port your number out of voice, which is nice. I happened to get a number that spells something fun, so I would keep it that way.
[+] Daviey|2 years ago|reply
They are actively promoting their Google Voice product via their Google Workspace organisation/enterprise product suite, I've had multiple sales emails over the past couple of months trying to promote it. Perhaps they are winding down their consumer product, but the enterprise product seems to be still alive.
[+] timwis|2 years ago|reply
You know you can port your google voice number away, right? I’ve ported mine in both directions.
[+] qodeninja|2 years ago|reply
Oh god dont even get me started on this! This has really put me in a bad spot because now I have to move all my doamins onto a new host not to mention all the emails I have to update. Seriously fuck Google.
[+] jpswade|2 years ago|reply
“In keeping with our efforts to sharpen our focus, we have entered into a definitive agreement with Squarespace for the acquisition of customer accounts of the Google Domains registrar business,” said Matt Madrigal, Vice President and General Manager, Merchant Shopping of Google.

I imagine they've underestimated what it takes to operate as a domain registrar, and presumably there's too much politics and conflict of interest in that space.

[+] Onavo|2 years ago|reply
My guess is because it just doesn't bring in enough profits. Most domain registrars make money through volume by either having a relatively small team (porkbun etc.), having most of the team located in a low CoL jurisdiction (Namecheap and eastern Europe/formerly Ukraine), or from value added services/the registrar acting as a loss leader (pretty much every service do this to an extent, CloudFlare, GoDaddy etc.)

For a company like Google that pays top tier salary, there is no way that selling domains (especially not in bulk, their targets are mostly consumers and businesses, domain traders use other services) make enough money. If you take a look at the commiters on https://github.com/google/nomulus

That's at least 10 engineers maintaining one component. Add in SRE and product executives, you are looking at expenses in the two digit millions minimum.

The decision is definitely short sighted but somebody high up no longer wants it as a loss leader.

[+] DomKM|2 years ago|reply
Because, as a registrar, they are not allowed to just shut it down.

More seriously, Google's culture seems fundamentally incapable of longterm investment in anything that isn't directly related to their core advertising business, even if that thing is an onramp to their core offerings (as you pointed out). It's sad and frustrating to observe.

[+] spullara|2 years ago|reply
Google offers domain registration through Google Cloud and its feature set competes directly with Route 53:

https://cloud.google.com/dns (Cloud Domains)

Google Domains competes with hosting registrars like GoDaddy.

[+] paulgb|2 years ago|reply
FWIW I was able to move a bunch of my Google Domains domains over to Google Cloud Domains, but not without a couple hitches:

- The default quota is 20 domains per account, so I have to wait to get an increase approved. Surprisingly, they have a happy-path for transferring a domain you already own in Google Domains, but it counts against the same quota as a new registration.

- Some domains supported by Google Domains are not supported by Google Cloud. It seems to be about “premium” pricing, not the TLD.

Hopefully they improve the experience in the transition period: increase the quota and reach parity in domains supported.

[+] LouisSayers|2 years ago|reply
Also scratching my head...

The most logical thing that would make sense to me is that someone at SquareSpace has a close relationship with someone at Google that is able to influence such decisions?!

[+] jrflowers|2 years ago|reply
> They’ll sell Google Fi to T-mobile and abandon Google voice?

Why not?

[+] Mandatum|2 years ago|reply
As someone who shifted all their domains to Google Domains at the cost of margin.. I guess I'm shifting back to PorkBun or NameCheap.
[+] petercooper|2 years ago|reply
I hold domains at nearly all the popular registrars (eggs, one basket, etc.) but https://iwantmyname.com/ is another I want to add to the list. It's not often mentioned but is notable in being one of very few registrars to not attempt upsells to hosting, services, etc. NameCheap irritates me with this practice in particular.
[+] CTDOCodebases|2 years ago|reply
I'm curious why you shifted to them in the first place. What did they offer you that PorkBun of NameCheap did not?
[+] qodeninja|2 years ago|reply
same -____- and im starting not to like namecheap. Someone else mentioned CloudFlare but for me only if their email forwarding is solid.
[+] retrocryptid|2 years ago|reply
Because it costs too much just to cancel it.
[+] zinekeller|2 years ago|reply
More like there are actual legal consequences to do so. Remember that they've only sold the registrar part, not the registry part (aka the one operating .dev and .zip among others). ICANN binds Google (and others) to maintain all validly-purchased domains, whether by a slow shutdown (no renewals, only obligation of current period) or by acquiring it by some other registrar: Squarespace (or more specifically its subsidiary) is already an accredited registrar (https://www.icann.org/en/accredited-registrars?page=1&iana-n...). The "carrot" is even stronger for Google because if ICANN sees them as naughty, ICANN can pull the registry part (which also holds their .goog and .google TLDs) and make Google's life miserable.
[+] ChrisArchitect|2 years ago|reply
What? Google selling Domains to Squarespace?

For anyone that missed it, is there a link to the story you're talking about? on here or otherwise

And if there is a story on here (which obviously there would be) why aren't you just in there asking your question with everyone else? :-\

[+] philipkiely|2 years ago|reply
Does anyone know if this change is going to affect top-level domains operated by Google, for example .dev?
[+] happytiger|2 years ago|reply
They looked at the numbers and forgot about being critical to developers as a brand point.