bad analogy. There's no parent/child relationship between this service and google. As long as the service is continued, there's no issue as to who is owning and operating it.
Using children makes it seem like google is providing essential operational expertise to keep the child alive, and the child would die if stopped.
Nah, my analogy between a kid or a car is that if you get thing that is meant to be decently long term, car at least a year or a kid at least 18 years, you wouldn't give up in 3 months. There's not many things a person would own or have that giving up in 3 months wouldn't see like ditching it. Even giving up a cell phone in 3 months is pretty daft
When you are Google, you have millions in funding, almost unlimited engineering ressources, political connections and many good reasons why a project would be successful (journalists, audience, users, accounts, etc)
Once you transfer the responsibilities; all of the support that kept the project stay afloat disappears.
It's not sustainable anymore, there is much limited growth, all the business model for exploiting data for advertising cannot exist anymore, etc.
Depends if the project continues to use google branding or has a “built by google” tagged on to it in order to mislead customers that it is still somehow maintained by them.
