20. EU Fonts

Google Fonts is a big no-no nowadays and could even rack up fines for European companies.

Problem

The EU courts as well those of its member states are finally showing their teeth when it comes to privacy on the internet for its citizens.

Google offers Google Fonts, a service that serves fonts to end users. As users talk to Google’s servers directly, it allows Google to harvest their IP addresses and track users across websites.

IP addresses are considered PII (personal identifiable information), having your IP addresses shipped to an American ad-tech company presents a liability for companies of any size. One week ago a company was fined for passing on their users IP address to Google Fonts.

Solution

An EU-hosted and controlled alternative to Google Fonts with the same API, ideally with support for self-hosting.

There are some proxy implementations out there, but those are in breach of Google’s Terms of Service at first glance, with Google being unresponsive in a thread enquiring about it.

The complicatedness and enforcement of EU privacy regulation provides a pain point for many companies and governments. Where there are pain points there are business opportunities.

Business Model

I think there are multiple paths to take, which are not mutually exclusive.

1. Good old pay-once software

• Allow users to pay for the software to self-host with a fixed up-front cost.

• Much like desktop software you could offer two years of software updates (and a discount on renewals of that).

• You could have different tiers dependent on the type of customer (e.g. €19 for non-profit and personal projects, €119 for commercial projects and small companies and €419 for companies with >€500,000 in revenue).

2. Software as a Service

• Offer it as a hosted service, where customers pay a monthly fee. Their dedicated subdomain (e.g. bigcompany.myfontservice.eu) should only serve fonts to a customer supplied list of origins.

3. Public CDN

• Get funding/subsidies from the EU and other government institutions to maintain a public CDN (content delivery network).

• In your terms of service state that companies above a certain size need to enter an agreement and pay for the service if they want to use it on their internet-facing websites.