It’s blocked in more than the EU.

It seems it wouldn’t be hard to list the regions it’s available and at least allow a description of what it is. To know if it’s worth using VPN

Agreed

Companies like google are quite well equiped to launch anything globally.

And in this specific case, its a Chess demo, its probably something different

It is very annoying at most big techs to go through launch approval for something all new and adding yet another approved or checklist for the EU is not worth the tradeoff of time for something experimental/early.

Big companys should just have a basic department handling this without much overhead.

That department becomes the overhead every time since it imposes requirements or work on the team doing the actual creation. They make the teams building the product make changes or answer questions and “gate” releases. Every time you add someone extra things slow down if their whole job is related to reducing risk. Misaligned incentives.

We talk about google not some small company which never faced this issue.

Allowing of a global login, SDK and default workflows would make it very easy to comply to everything.

I have worked at multiple of the FAANGs. I know quite well how much overhead these kind of releases take and how much overhead any centralized release team made to “help” end up adding. It’s not just a few small things that you mention.

I wanted you and your sibling commenter to know that even though we're probably coming from opposite ends of the political spectrum, I meant no malice or schadenfreude by my comment.

Despite being a huge capitalist, I do think there's a sweet spot of very minimal regulation that works out best for everyone.

However, the blocking-the-EU outcome is obvious after a couple of minutes of thinking about it in game theory terms. Another one to look out for is companies (both physical and digital) that never even considered doing business in the EU, but who would have if it were easy.