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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>I fail to see what, in AMP, makes the web less free or open.

Google serving your pages?

Hijacking your domain for the server pages and obscuring links to the original content?

Use of a proprietary technology (whether open sourced or not, it's not a standard)?

Abuse of power with veiled threats of punishing content publishers who are not using recommending AMP to make their pages "fast and responsive"?

The only way to be any more against the free and open web is if they made Google search a web proxy where you never get access to the underlying page...

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> The only way to be any more against the free and open web is if they made Google search a web proxy where you never get access to the underlying page...

Give it some time. They are pulling more and more content into the search results pages which has roughly that effect, since people no longer click through.

Interestingly, assuming it works well, that's kind of exactly what I want as a user. Whenever I'm searching for one of the following (which form a large fraction of my searches):

  - definition of a word
  - lyrics of a song
  - summary of a movie
  - phone number and/or address of a business
  - distance between places
  - unit or currency conversions
  - weather

I have no desire to "click through" to anything. I want my piece of information, a raw fact. That I have to select from various providers, each with their own (non-standardized) UX and possibly various "value-added" crap like ads and popups, is at best a nuisance, at worst a big time-waster. In this way, the "content providers" are becoming annoying middlemen between me and the information I seek.

So while I don't want to see Google monopolizing the Internet, I also don't like the model in which information is served by individual web pages (which can, and do, disappear all the time and get replaced by something different). So I wonder - how can we promote and develop the open web, while also making it better and more productive for people?

Maybe if people served data streams instead of web pages, things would be easier? Related, I'm all for every kind of way of taking control over the way a page looks away from their authors. The Web is increasingly becoming a place for designers to show off, and this wastes both users' time and resources. Ad blockers, noscript and reader modes are huge wins in this space, but I think we need more. Maybe some self-hosted auto scrappers that would help me answer my information queries without actually visiting full pages?

Well, then maybe, you know, Google should actually create that content rather than plagiarize it?

That's a different issue altogether. The information is there, it's freely and publicly available (by definition - if it weren't, it wouldn't show in search engines' results) - it's just in the wrong format.

I'm increasingly more convinced that the best way to save open, distributed web would be to kill off Internet commerce. Think of it this way: when I'm searching for information, I'm like a fish searching for food. There are places where it naturally occurs, but more and more food is placed by businesses, who attach them to hooks in order to bait me into spending time and money on stuff I don't want. Great for the fishermen, but in this story I'm a fish.

(Sure it's a pipe dream, but it serves to highlight the conflict of interest. As an Internet user, I seek information - not deals, contracts, and all the other strings people try and attach to that information.)

> The information is there, it's freely and publicly available (by definition - if it weren't, it wouldn't show in search engines' results) - it's just in the wrong format.

No, there is such a thing as copyright. That Google ignores it doesn't make it any more right than when Hollywood balks at piracy because piracy tends to make bits available in 'the right format'. That knife cuts both ways.

> I'm increasingly more convinced that the best way to save open, distributed web would be to kill off Internet commerce.

Well, that won't happen.

> Think of it this way: when I'm searching for information, I'm like a fish searching for food. There are places where it naturally occurs, but more and more food is placed by businesses, who attach them to hooks in order to bait me into spending time and money on stuff I don't want. Great for the fishermen, but in this story I'm a fish.

Google is one of the fishermen, in fact, they are running the largest trawler on the planet.

> No, there is such a thing as copyright.

Copyright is rightfully seen a problem on the Internet :). Personally I'm currently fine with both pirates offering bits in the "right format" and with Google offering information in a better format - especially that they don't have any monopoly for that, just enough man-hours and burnable cash to do it first.

(INB4: I do respect copyright (at least more often than not), but I still believe it's ill-suited for the digital age.)

> Well, that won't happen.

One can dream, though...

> Google is one of the fishermen, in fact, they are running the largest trawler on the planet.

I know. I don't want any form of Google monopoly. I don't like AMP either. My only point is that Google displaying content in search results is an example of a better interface to the Web than the regular site visit; it saves me time, clicks, and prevents me from being exposed to all kinds of crap I don't want to see. I'm definitely not arguing we need Google for that - just that I wish we'd all go much further into that direction, preferably with free and open-source tools.

>I'm increasingly more convinced that the best way to save open, distributed web would be to kill off Internet commerce. Think of it this way: when I'm searching for information, I'm like a fish searching for food.

Look at it this way: people doing internet commerce are also searching for food -- to put it on their table.

And in the process they're trashing the Internet; shitting in their own bed, to be frank, because those same people who put crap on-line also want to use the Web to search for the information they need quickly and efficiently...

(Related, I wonder how many people in adtech actually use ad blockers.)

And in general: people need to earn their living, yes, but that does imply society should support any particular business model.

>I have no desire to "click through" to anything. I want my piece of information, a raw fact.

Do you also want the original content creators to starve and die off and the only competent content source left to be either Google's archive or Google's lacklustre service for the same thing?

As I said many times in discussions about ad-blockers - I think that content that can't exist in a non-ad-supported way can stop existing, we'll all be better off. Almost anything that's valuable on-line is either a marketing expense or done pro bono.

Also, I didn't mean I want a Google-dominated reality. Only said that this particular feature - content in search results - is a step in the right direction; it showcases a better way to use the Web. The reality I want is made of free and open-source tools doing that, not Google.

> I think that content that can't exist in a non-ad-supported way can stop existing, we'll all be better off.

I'm not sure what is stopping you from doing that now. You can blacklist domains that serve ads and stop visiting them. Or even better yet, hire someone to write a browser plugin that blocks websites with ads, should be fairly trivial to do. And release the source code so others can benefit.

It's even simpler and I alerady do it - all it takes is to install an ad blocker.

Right, I thought you were principled. My mistake !!

>Almost anything that's valuable on-line is either a marketing expense or done pro bono.

So, like Netflix?

s/Almost anything/Almost anything available for free/

Netflix is a subscription service; I pay them, they stream me movies, the contract is straightforward.

> Google serving your pages?

Yeah, what's bad about that? It is, actually, a feature of a free open web: content is there, available to anyone, including Google, to be rehashed, kept, reserved, in anyway any one see fit.

Wikicache is a feature of an open web, that does a very similar thing to what Google is doing.

> Use of a proprietary technology (whether open sourced or not, it's not a standard)?

We have really come a long way if this is what we now call a proprietary technology. My understanding (but I could be wrong) is that the specification is open, everyone is free to implement it, fork it, make editors or readers about it.

Proprietary implies (or used to imply?) that some of these rights are limited: the MPEG consortium forbidding encoders without acquiring a proper license, Oracle claiming that you can't make a Java VM without making an agreement with them, etc...

My understanding is that AMP is as open as it could be: it was just proposed by a private entity. Criticism is a good thing, but saying it will break the open web is simply a warning I can not understand.

If something needs to be criticized, it is Google's quasi-monopoly on search, but even that is not that much of a threat given how many of its competitors are still easily accessible from any device and out there to gain a foothold as soon as Google's search results show any kind of weakness.

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