Normally when Google cancels a service, it’s annoying and baffling, but we grumble and find an alternative. Google’s latest rug-pull is much worse: it effectively hands a massive win to those who wish to prevent access to things they don’t like.

Until the feature was disabled recently by Google, it was possible to use Google’s App Engine to make web sites and other online resources available to users who would normally be blocked due to state- and corporate-sponsored censorship. The method used was referred to as domain fronting.

Google says they never meant for domain fronting to be possible with App Engine, but they also allowed it to happen for years, without any indication that it was a problem or would be stopped. So people started to rely on the service to get around censorship.

There’s a lot of hate directed towards Google these days, and a lot of it is misguided. From my perspective, enticing users with new services, only to kill those services once they are widely used, is their most infuriating habit.