However, if you are a 'user' in the sense of a company wanting to make software to sell as a service, it doesn't protect you very much, and can make you vulnerable.
That does not meet the definition of "user", does it?
In addition, if that was the motivation behind that absurd claim, why not be honest and just say "we don't release our software under a FLOSS license because what we actually want is to keep it proprietary"?
*Assuming it's not a memory-store as a service, obviously.
However this is rather uniquely due to Google's monorepo infrastructure. Google quite literally has all its products in the same source code repository, being built and statically linked together to create a single system binary (or so I am told--I've never worked there). In this case AGPL would virally infect the rest of your code and you could find yourself in trouble. Even if they don't, they might get hit with a discovery request for the source code of some project to prove compliance, and in the process have to provide their entire monorepo and all its business secrets to the court. Etc. Etc.
But these are concerns which stem directly from Google's monorepo architecture. It's not generally true of the whole industry. And yet Google's fear of copyleft--rational though it may be in their particular instance--has been copied throughout the entire industry. 99% of the companies out there have nothing to fear from the AGPL. But hey, if you're some random in-house lawyer at company XYZ, who are you to question Google's legal precedent?
This is a first. If anything, it seems clear that a FLOSS license such as AGPL achieves exactly the opposite: is highly protective of the users' best interests, both in the short term and long term.
Could you elaborate on why do you think that users are harmed by standard, run-of-the-mill FLOSS licenses?