I'm surprised at how long this has gone on, but not at all surprised that it happened. Based on my experience at Google, I would have expected the NYT article

I'm surprised at how long this has gone on, but not at all surprised that it happened. Based on my experience at Google, I would have expected the NYT article to get it unstuck within 2-3 days. When I was at Google, I was continuously amazed at how hard it was to stop this kind of own-goal when we knew it was happening. (Based on where I was inside Google, I came across (dramatically-less-sensational) obviously dumb decisions of this sort). It was always shockingly hard as a Googler to get traction on fixing some customer's bureaucracy-navigation problem -- but usually it getting into the press finally got someone through the bureaucracy.