Agreed. Google long ago passed the event horizon where they could keep pretending they were not mission-critical infrastructure for a significant portion of their users, and (from privacy to reliability) I'm glad they've put in structure to enforce acting like it, even if that means they no longer feel like working at a startup.

Everyone who wants to work at a startup knows where to find the rest of Silicon Valley (and Austin and etc.). I wish them the best and I look forward to reading their data-breach disclosures if they get popular enough for anyone to care about what they're doing.

I was at Meta when it was forced by the FTC to start adding this compliance stuff. It SUCKED to retrofit everything.

Now I'm at google, and onboarded on to the version of the infra that already went through that, and I can take it all at face value. It is a PAIN still, but this is the reality of a system that interfaces with O(10^8) users, O(10^2) governments.