Podcast
Root Causes 316: SquareSpace Acquires Google Domains


Hosted by
Tim Callan
Chief Compliance Officer
Jason Soroko
Fellow
Original broadcast date
July 11, 2023
SquareSpace recently acquired Google's domain registry business. We discuss what this move says about large technology trends.
Podcast Transcript
Lightly edited for flow and brevity.
And I thought that was interesting. According to the press release, Squarespace is saying that they're transferring approximately 10 million domains from Google over to Squarespace and I think some of those 10 million are mine, because I was a customer of Google's domain registry. And I'll tell you why. I’ll tell you why I was a customer flat out. Here's a little bit of advertisement for what used to be. It was just easy. And it was price driven. I think I've said the story on the podcast before, Tim, it’s kind of kind of funny, just shows how old I am. My first domain was purchased around 1992 or 1993 and I actually licked an envelope closed with a check, put a stamp on it. I think I had the lick the stamp, too. That might be how old that is. And the funny thing about it was I sent a check from a Canadian bank to an American university who happened to be Rutgers and they actually sent me my check back saying we can't cash this but here's your domain anyway.
So, as you know, Tim, Google has started a lot of projects and cancelled a lot of projects and some of those projects were terrific and people cried when they were killed. And this is another one where it's like, ah, Google, you had a good thing going. It was a good registrar and it was certainly handy if you're using Google Cloud in any kind of way. It was just a great place to park domains. It was a good place to use domains, especially if you were going to put Google's business services on top of it. It just became just a one click no brainer experience. It was fantastic. But it's gone.
And so this podcast, we talk about web security, we talk about a lot of browser experience, and obviously publicly trusted certificates. That's the sphere of this podcast. But, domains and domain registrars is something that's within this fear of that and I thought, I just wanted to bring it up to make people aware. I bet you some of you have purchased domains through Google, and might not even be aware of this June 15 announcement, and I just wanted to bring it up and maybe ask the question, Tim, why do you think they might have done that?
What's the reason? Well, I'll tell you what Google said. I had it right here in front of me, but basically it was about focus. The statement from Google was, we need to focus on the businesses that are core to our success, and this is something that we do habitually and we're doing it again here.

