Latest Google rug-pulling is a victory for censorship

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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.

About jrivett

Jeff Rivett has worked with and written about computers since the early 1980s. His first computer was an Apple II+, built by his father and heavily customized. Jeff's writing appeared in Computist Magazine in the 1980s, and he created and sold a game utility (Ultimaker 2, reviewed in the December 1983 Washington Apple Pi Journal) to international markets during the same period. Proceeds from writing, software sales, and contract programming gigs paid his way through university, earning him a Bachelor of Science (Computer Science) degree at UWO. Jeff went on to work as a programmer, sysadmin, and manager in various industries. There's more on the About page, and on the Jeff Rivett Consulting site.

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