It seems like a deliberate action to drive people to the Google browser. Other companies should not have to continually implement deprecated APIs just to play catch-up. It's a clear abuse of market dominance.

> Another rather interesting aspect to note is that Polymer's latest versions support both Shadow DOM v0 and v1 APIs, but for some reason, Google still uses Polymer 1.0 with the deprecated API.

They have an obligation to code websites using modern and open standards.

That's part of being a good internet citizen. Other companies have broken that responsibility (silver light) and we were correctly critical of them then.

None, but it's political. Gov could step in and break Google, because it's a monopoly.