As an ex-Googler, the problem here is clear and common, and it's not the infrastructure cost: it's ownership.

No one wants to own this product.

- The code could be partially frozen, but large scale changes are constantly being made throughout the google3 codebase, and someone needs to be on the hook for approving certain changes or helping core teams when something goes wrong. If a service it uses is deprecated, then lots of work might need to be done.

- Every production service needs someone responsible for keeping it running. Maybe an SRE, thought many smaller teams don't have their own SREs so they manage the service themselves.

So you'd need some team, some full reporting chain all the way up, to take responsibility for this. No SWE is going to want to work on a dead product where no changes are happening, no manager is going to care about it. No director is going to want to put staff there rather than a project that's alive. No VP sees any benefit here - there's only costs and risks.

This is kind of the Reader situation all over again (except for the fact that a PM with decent vision could have drastically improved and grown Reader, IMO).

This is obviously bad for the internet as a whole, and I personally think that Google has a moral obligation to not rug pull infrastructure like this. Someone there knows that critical links will be broken, but it's in no one's advantage to stop that from happening.

I think Google needs some kind of "attic" or archive team that can take on projects like this and make them as efficiently maintainable in read-only mode as possible. Count it as good-will marketing, or spin it off to google.org and claim it's a non-profit and write it off.

Side note: a similar, but even worse situation for the company is the Google Domains situation. Apparently what happened was that a new VP came into the org that owned it and just didn't understand the product. There wasn't enough direct revenue for them, even though the imputed revenue to Workspace and Cloud was significant. They proposed selling it off and no other VPs showed up to the meeting about it with Sundar so this VP got to make their case to Sundar unchallenged. The contract to sell to Squarespace was signed before other VPs who might have objected realized what happened, and Google had to buy back parts of it for Cloud.

To some extent, it's cases like this which show the real fragility of everything existing as a unified whole in google3.

While clearly maintenance and ownership is still a major problem, one could easily imagine deploying something similar — especially read-only — using GCP's Cloud Run and BigTable products could be less work to maintain, as you're not chasing anywhere near such a moving target.

Many good points, but if you don't mind me asking: if you were at Google, would you be willing to be the lead of that archive team, knowing that you'll be stuck at this position for the next 10 years, with the possibility of your team being downsized/eliminated when the wind blows slightly in the other direction?