Government Regulations Helped Kill Google Reader

The service would have had to be redesigned to comply with restrictive and varying rules

Google plans to kill the popular Reader service today—and government over-regulation played a big role, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The service, which allows users to see new posts from their favorite blogs and websites all on one page, has been around since 2005 and has millions of users, so the decision to end the program left many wondering: why kill it?

"You would think that it would take little effort to maintain the site, but compliance keeps the cost up," the source told FoxNews.com.

He gave one example of a costly regulation.

"In Europe they've had a regulation for years where basically, if someone requests that all their data on a site be deleted, the company must comply. Reader wasn't compliant with that. So it comes down to, do you spend a lot more resources making the service compliant, or working on something new?"