[ignoramous]

For the same reason Apple operates Private Relay. Google also cares a tonne about state censorship blocking access to its web services.

A refresher: Google runs world's largest public DNS resolver, builds a browser used by 3b+, and an OS by 2b+. If they need to harvest data, they most certainly don't need a VPN (and may be that's why they killed it).

[chatmasta]

Apple doesn’t operate Private Relay, and in fact that’s kind of the point: nodes are operated by three separate entities (Cloudflare, Fastly and Akamai IIRC). And the protocol is designed such that no entity can link your identity to your traffic. It’s actually quite cool and worth reading more about if you aren’t familiar with it.

[jgrahamc]

Yep, see: https://blog.cloudflare.com/icloud-private-relay

[Veliladon]

I don’t think that’s the answer. I don’t know about Google One but iCloud Private Relay doesn’t work in China straight up. You get a message saying it’s not allowed in the territory.