Another headstone in the google graveyard. This one doesn't make any sense to me, either, unless there are weird regulatory issues they want to avoid since it seemed like a very popular registrar. Or maybe they just didn't want to staff any limited customer support team.
This is one of my pet peeves of GDPR! Your nephew and IP Octet cases are very extreme edge cases that we shouldn't build policy around if there are major drawbacks to including them. It's bad there is ostensibly no compliant way to count anonymized unique users in Europe under the current framework.
The people actually building the buildings (developers) are, generally, different than the people renting out buildings (landlords). Developers profit when more units are built, landlords are hurt with increased competition.
Also, recent California law was changed so that the maximum allowable annual rent increase is ~10% (still rough if you are hit with that, but better than 30%).
Regardless of relative value, in most cases it is cheaper to just demolish and rebuild office space than gut + renovate. SROs/boarding house cases make a little more economic sense for these conversions but are more unpopular uses.