[oldnewthing]

I believe the reason for divesting from the registrar business had to do more with ICANN rules that require Google not both be a registry operator and a registrar. Google does have a large registry business with 60+ TLDs so they could not also be a registrar (even if not for the same TLDs). It wasn’t really a money thing AFAIK.

[duskwuff]

Google already had an arms-length subsidiary (Charleston Road Registry) to take care of that requirement. The Google Domains shutdown came much later.