Were the alternatives any better? I don't recall any telecom companies committing to warrant canaries or the like. And speaking of, whatever happened to those?

> Were the alternatives any better? I don't recall any telecom companies committing to warrant canaries or the like.

Well, no. But Google does significant business in foreign countries and doesn't really want to give an excuse for foreign governments to start aggressively pursuing their own alternatives.

> And speaking of, whatever happened to those?

Cloudflare still has a warrant canary on their transparency report page, Reddit deleted theirs in 2016.

They were never very common.