HN user
Yeah there is likely tremendous backlash from this, and now they want to drop it off. The phishing reports discussing .zip highly likely clash with Mandiant's report-writing.
Mandiant: ".zip is bad, stupid idea" Google: "We own Mandiant, and yeah." Mandiant: "Google dumb, why they own us?" Google: "We sell our entire domains solution"
Your IP address is overused. Sounds like your Internet is really trash or you are using a massively shared network.
Also you just said VPN next to captcha. It is common knowledge that using a VPN, you will have a shared IP with other users of said VPN. Commonly people run scripts against Google, to scrap intel, and or find victim results to attack; exploit to break in.
It is highly likely an evil human used the VPN to attempt Google dorks for malicious queries. Rather than complain about getting captchas while on VPN, go build your own VPN with your own unique IP address and you will rarely get captchas.
It is probably going to get converted/transferred over into Squarespace's API ecosystem, brush up on theirs to be safe.
High likeliness, though, that they will keep the Google API very similar, or even the same.