Along those lines, if Google decides I’m a bot or nefarious developer as seems to mistakenly happen on occasion judging from recent hacker news posts, will I then lose my domain name? Or at least access to it? At this point tying any major asset solely to a Google account feels risky.

But don't worry, if a mistake happens, I'm sure you can just call Google's customer service and get it straightened out. Ha!

Paid google products, like google domains, have a 24-hour helpline https://domains.google.com/contactus

I've heard that if you call during the day you get someone who's actually competent, not just some T1 support person.

Doesn't matter the level of support, the CEO of Cloudflare was involved and still ended up bringing politics into infrastructure.

Who is a good/trustworthy registrar then?

https://namesilo.com - reliable, cheap & they offer free whois privacy. All they do is sell domains.

I couldn't recommend namesilo more! They almost always have the slowest price, very close to what the registry charges them.

Their UI is dead simple and gets things done well and fast.

Amazon Route 53. Full blown registrar.

cloudflare?

Problem with Cloudflare is that their CEO has taken down a domain for political reasons.

While I agree with him taking the domain down, but what about the next CEO?

That's just false information. They didn't take any domain down. They stopped offering their CDN/proxying service to a customer. That customer is/was free to host their own content using their own or a different service. No company should be required to offer services to anyone and everyone unless they are the only option on the market. And cloudflare is very far from the only CDN on the market.

Unless I'm thinking of something else, it's not a domain registered through CloudFlare. The taken down site was using CloudFlare's reverse proxy service. IIRC, Matthew wrote about the incident in length.

I personally don't use CF for various reasons, but this site take down is not one of them.

The full context here is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daily_Stormer#Site_hosting...

care to explain this? Thanks

And would I have any way to actually reach a human at Google, aside from media heat from a Reddit/HN/etc front page story?

Probably none, going by the track record.

It really depends on the product. E.g. if you buy Google Wifi, you can call them or chat with customer support, etc. If you need help with constructing a web search query, not so much.

So, please do not over generalize or compare apples to oranges.

As a customer, I can't be expected to have a mental model of which Google services come with actual support, and which ones come with Google-it-yourself support.

Comparing Google products to Google products should not be comparing apples to oranges. If Google is frustrated with customers assuming they don't support their products, maybe they should support all of their products, not just a select few.

Ask yourself "Do I pay for this Google product?" If the answer is yes, then the product comes with actual support.

They should quote that on the GMail sign up page.

I am frustrated by Google’s lack of support as anyone else, but it is completely unreasonable to expect support for a free product, regardless of how they might otherwise profit off you.

I'm not frustrated because I don't rely any Google services.

I was serious, though. People would be less frustrated if they had that helpful reminder on sign up.

Obfuscating that GMail isn't a real product is just another one of their sleazy business tactics, I guess.

You can't say for sure that any new Google product is guaranteed to have horrible customer support, but you probably should assume that any new Google product has horrible customer support until you see proof of the contrary.

Google Fi’s support might be great. But you have to pay for it through Google Payments which is another potential single point of failure. If you ever trip any of their fraud flags you’ll probably never be allowed to pay for anything through google again, and good luck getting it fixed.

https://onemileatatime.com/google-fi-review/

Sorry, but I reserve the right to be cynic. I belong to the old group of people who got to know Google as "do no evil" company, who tossed that to the wind as soon at it suited them better.

I wouldn't lease the domain through Google domains. Use a different registrar --- if possible, one that you'll be able to trust. That registrar will work with the registry of the TLD, which would be google in this case, and has a much better chance of actually resolving issues than if you were a direct customer of Google Domains.

Now you have two entities who can fuck it up for you instead of just one.

While this is true there are very few reasons why a domain registrar will give you a lifetime ban let alone automatically do it for some perceived TOS crime, let alone refuse to tell you what your alleged misdeed was, let alone automatically reject evidence you submit to the contrary and keep your domains. Imagine the liability!?

Meanwhile someone got their Adsense account banned and in those cases Google refunds the allegedly fraudulent revenue to the advertisers and do not pay you the non-fraudulent revenue. The person who got banned went to court over it because it looked like Google schedules these things to maximize how much they could keep, Google fought for four years to conceal where the non-fraudulent revenue went and then settled for $11 million to keep that shrouded in mystery.

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/adsense-lawsuit/248135/

Note the nobody who will say what happens to your domains when your account is banned despite relevant Google personnel participating in this page, but they have time to detail how we're covered by ICANN if Google with $106+ billion in savings goes bankrupt in thousands of years...

They designed this awful system exactly the way they wanted it to work and they choose to keep it this way, everyone else should probably not use them for domains or web hosting in case yourself or someone associated with your account is irreversibly judged to have committed a TOS transgression somewhere within their empire.

What registrar would you suggest? I have some on Google but I think I want to transfer now.

I also have some on Namecheap, are those safe?

I've been using https://www.hover.com/ for many years and they're great. Mostly because the prices aren't too bad, the dashboard makes sense, and they never contact me.

That's a redundant question, because just about every registry can dictate what their TLDs can be used for. It's part of the design laid down by ICANN.

- For Verisign with .com, they don't care if you're really a company or not.

- With Minds & Machines and .law, they only want qualified lawyers, courts, legal schools, etc. using the TLD.

Keep in mind that the registry and registrar are different things.

I think the difference is that Google boots folks off YouTube for political purposes while VeriSign does not kick people away from their .com.

Godaddy banned Gab for political reasons as well. While you can split hairs and say that's just a registrar, you can also split hairs and say that youtube is just a hosted content platform. If you're thinking of running another infowars then I would advise avoiding registering domains with any major tech platform in general.

@bduerst, Forgive my ignorance, but just to distill it down to brass tacks:

In this case, Google is the registry and thus the supreme court of who can and cannot be on this domain and there is no recourse if they yank your claim on the domain?

Is it more nuanced than that?

I mean, the entire domain name infrastructure is set up so that someone along the path can revoke registrations, all the way up to ICANN itself.

IME you're much more likely to be banned by the registrar than the registry itself. Registries want people to use their TLDs, so they're not going to reject post-registration unless you've changed how you're using the TLD and it's violating the rules they originally laid down. Registrars are much more consumer facing and will act accordingly - i.e. GoDaddy banning Gab.

Google has a track record of being capricious with bans, whereas other companies do not.

And just like that, the 'Tech Lead of Google Registry' has fallen silent.