Googler, opinions are my own.

It is wildly noncompliant, and Google should be sued over it like they were over the same thing in YouTube in France.

> It is wildly noncompliant, and Google should be sued over it like they were over the same thing in YouTube in France.

this really reinforces GP's point

At least the Google Store now has a country selection switch, but I suspect that that also only happened due to new EU regulations requiring them to do so.

If they are unwilling to let go of the Google brand (understandable!) then the parent company perhaps should have been called Google.

Even innocent sounding replies can surface later and cause legal or PR headaches for the company. If one person out of 10,000 says something about XYZ, it is way too easy for it to taken as the truth, adding even more burden the legal/PR problems that every big company is constantly managing.

This is a list of countries just off the top of my head that has sued Google in the last decade:

    United States
    European Union (which consists of multiple member states)
    Australia
    France
    Germany
    Italy
    Spain
    Russia
    India
    Brazil
    South Korea
    Turkey
    Canada

It is common to refer to the members of the EU as "member states."

I'm curious what state you're from where it's normal to refer to EU members as "member states" ? USA perhaps ?

Definition from wikitionary (but nothing is special about this choice of dictionary, you should find a similar definition in any dictionary): https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/state#Noun

> The European Union (EU) is a supranational political and economic union of 27 member states that are located primarily in Europe.

"State" made perfect sense in context of the post.

The way to avoid lawsuits in civilized countries is to avoid breaking the laws east and west.

Start with the GDPR:

There is no competent lawyer that doesn't understand the basics of GDPR, there are only companies that are testing if they can get away by playing dumb.

They announced that it's now available in 180+ countries in English.

Either that 180+ country rollout isn't complete, or I guess they have something against Canada('s laws) in particular.

Edit: Amusingly using a VPS provided by google as a proxy is enough to get around this.

There is a reason why you call it "massive" company which is because it has many people who are able to support the launch parallely . which is the whole USP of being massive.

Also, please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. That's no doubt why users flagged your comment in the first place. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

> Today this has went backwards like everything else Google it seems.

Google is not a startup. What's the point of comparing it to when it was 100 employees? Not to mention the regulatory changes that have occurred...

I just think it's remarkable how people can take any piece of good news and find the most negative interpretation of it.

If only it worked well at least in the US, but from what I can hear, it's just like in the rest of the world: a disappointing, bland, unfinished experience on all of their products.

Legislation has consequences.

Though the release does say 180 countries and with rollouts like this it tends to be staged so I wouldn't be surprised if some folks in this thread (i.e.. the person from Canada) are just hitting a cache.