People rely on a lot of "free" Google services, but don't realize that it takes an enormous amount of people to keep things running without security issues. Ano

People rely on a lot of "free" Google services, but don't realize that it takes an enormous amount of people to keep things running without security issues. Another point is that, it takes hundreds of thousands of paying customers to get something to a point it is self sustainable. Just because a few random users are ready to pay $50 for the service, if at all, does not make it successful for Google or any other company. Short of "regulating" these companies to open-source or sell the infra to a caretaker entity when services are shutdown, there is no other option. Even then, it is a massive ask of Google (that every service be separable from anything proprietary Google infra provides), and it also unrealistic to expect another company / governing body to run it without issues. At this point, it is what it is. If you use a free service, expect it to die at some point in the future. This happens to many services where the entire company disappears. The fact that Google survived 20 years shouldn't be held against them if products went down and the company didn't. Numbers are enough to sway the stats and make Google the bad company that shuts-down services too often.