[lxgr]

To be fair, there are some legal implications to providing VPNs in many countries, since they're effectively making you look a lot like an ISP from a legal and practical point of view.

Google isn't a random fly-by-night VPN operator that can just ignore subpoenas and takedown notices, so they probably did some cost-reward analysis per country before offering it there.

They could have bypassed some (but probably not all) of that by offering cross-country VPN nodes, but I suspect that given their size they didn't want to get into the business of "jurisdiction shopping", nor did they have any interest in landing on various media companies' "geo-bypassing VPN IP range" block lists.