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

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 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.