[jasonkester]

Call it what you like. They're effectively punishing their own users because they don't like a 3rd party service.

Those users, however, clearly do like that 3rd party service, and would just like to get on with setting up their account there.

Any action at all by Google during that process (other than the expected one) just makes things worse for their users. The adult thing to do, then, is to simply not do anything to make matters worse.

[ephoz]

I'm not a big Facebook-fan, so I don't feel punished /at all/ when Google antagonizes the service... More like the opposite actually. That's just my opinion and I won't push for it more than this ; it's okay if we disagree. :)

I guess, if enough users would complain to Google or feel the need to leave their awesome free services for a more Facebook-friendly vendor, good for them. It's not like there's no choice since you can you know... export your data.

[davorak]

I think that they are preventing long term problems with their business model and at the same time, in my humble opinion, preventing long term societal problems. Expressed in greater detail here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1891167