It is actually insane that they did this. I literally stopped recommending people use GCP over this - you can't get started easily because you have to use another platform for the domain. Why even use GCP at all?

It was also incredibly sticky with GSuite. Setting up security and everything was a breeze -- DMARC email records, SMTP, etc all magic -- I truly couldn't believe when this was announced. It was incredibly sad and I still feel upset about it a year later.

Porkbun is my go to registrar now. And I switched my email to Migadu.

also at porkbun for dns, big fan.

saying this as someone who used to work for enom, if that matters.

Google Cloud Domains is still a thing, and you can purchase domains from the console still. The registrar changed to square space, but it didn't really impact Google Cloud's usage.

Even a worse decision then because they're still supporting UI around it.

Did it really come down to some PM not wanting to do registrar paperwork?

Absolutely staggering. Google Domains complemented GCP perfectly and would make thanks to Cloud DNS a stellar seamless end-to-end integration. I'm in disbelief as to why they removed this crucial feature while at the same time going full in with GCP.

I could understand deprecating Google Domains for B2C, but for B2B?! What went through their heads?

Because they couldn't shoehorn "AI" into the product, I guess.

No, some of the folks involved in the decision (literally) previously worked for GoDaddy. Even dumber.

Agreed, such a critical piece of infrastructure, the mind boggles. I'll have to see what I can pry out of our Google account team about it.

Even though I was a Google fanboy, this was a nail in the head. Had a .dev domain which expired and squarespace asked like 6 times more to let me buy it back. Waited till the grace period was over and bought it back for the original price from NameCheap.