Google has announced that it will begin rolling back its much-hated policies on name and account linking through Google+. Going forward, you will no longer be required to use your Google+ identity for all other websites and services. The rollback will begin with YouTube, arguably the site where users protested the loudest and were the angriest over the forced integration of G+. Google’s Bradley Horowitz, the VP for streams, photos, and sharing has written a blog post claiming that the move is a response to user feedback. “We’ve also heard that it doesn’t make sense for your Google+ profile to be your identity in all the other Google products you use,” Horowitz said.

The idea that this is some sort of new concept is ludicrous, and Google has only itself to blame for the cataclysmic decline of a once well-received service. The problems began as far back as 2010, when Google introduced a new “Search Plus Your World,” which integrated content from your friends’ streams into your search results. This was an awful idea — when I want to troubleshoot a problem or find good links to studies or journal articles, the last thing I’d want is to be bombarded with data from my family and friends.

The misfires just kept on coming. Google mandated a “real name” policy and initially locked users out of all Google services if it found they hadn’t used one. The company declared that all comments on YouTube would now be sorted by relevance and popularity rather than by upvotes or downvotes on the comments themselves. If you wanted to make YouTube comments, you had to open or use a Google Plus Account. If you tried to opt out of the Google Plus integration on YouTube, meanwhile, the company made it clear that it didn’t respect your decision to do so. The following “OK, we’ll ask you again later” image is what popped up if you chose to continue using your YouTube screen name.

Bit by bit, this transformed Google Plus from an intriguing alternative to Facebook into a product many people loathed. Before Google started shoving me towards G+, the company’s products users loved, like Reader, were killed, with some of their functionality integrated into Google Plus. In addition to Reader, Google Buzz, iGoogle, and Picasa Web Albums were all tied to Google Plus in one way or another. For years, new Gmail users were forced to sign up for the service as well.

When Google announced G+, I was initially in favor of a social network that wasn’t Facebook. The more services Google integrated into Google Plus, the less interested I was in using it, until I began actively avoiding anything attached to G+ out of principle. The decoupling of YouTube and G+ is a good move, but it’s years too late. The idea that the company just “learned” that it was a bad idea to enforce such restrictions is false, since after Google announced the policy, hundreds of thousands of people signed petitions to reverse the move. Letters were written from privacy-minded individuals, minorities, people who might be accessing the sites from repressive regimes, and basically anyone who had a reason not to want all of their web browsing to be tracked, combined, and served to advertisers on a silver platter.

Google didn’t implement these policies because it failed to learn a lesson, but because it arrogantly believed it could bully people into using its advertiser data-integration service. Hopefully decoupling YouTube and other accounts from G+ identities is the next step towards the eventual shutdown of the service.