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Comment by gressquel | Hacker News Reader

I wish they would add an additional 1 billion fine for AMP.

From what I read, AMP is a subset of HTML to make pages load faster and deliver ads more efficiently (which might appeal to content creators).

I assume that Google is attempting to make devs start using a proprietary technology instead of the well-established HTML standard, or:

- somehow lock everyone in with the format

- force people to switch to Chrome since it would run those pages better

- force other browsers to implement the technology (until they sneak in a patented technology once AMP is popular?)

Where can I read a good article about why AMP is bad?

AMP isn't bad in the sense that it makes websites faster. AMP is bad because it (usually, in common practice) switches the domain, so you lose control of a huge number of things and you essentially cede control to a third party, so instead of this:

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/10/07/us/politics/hillary-cl...

You get this:

https://amp.gstatic.com/v/mobile.nytimes.com/2015/10/07/us/p...

Now ironically, this is actually safer for a number of websites because it has the side effect of making normal HTTP content HTTPS, but the idea of Google taking over control over the content, the advertising, what methods are used for analytics tracking, and what possible pieces of content can be embedded destroys the whole "the web should be free" concept.

It's not something dramatically new, Facebook started doing it years ago and even Google news was a (more limited) form of it, but just because some things are possible doesn't mean they should be done. For example I can make a website, example.com, where every link gets turned into

example.com/v/yourwebsite.com

And then proxy all the content through my server replacing links like yourwebsite.com/login to example.com/v/yourwebsite.com/login and the majority of users will not notice that the website hasn't changed. And really the only thing that stops people from doing this is copyright law and a shared societal understanding that corporations should be able to control their content, not technical countermeasures.

Ah, I had no idea that the implementation required you to proxy everything through Google, I thought all you had to do was changing the code.

I would never do that.

Theoretically you could of course host your own AMP server, but of course if you're going to have your, say, mobile subdomain you can just as easily make things fast by just sticking to plain old HTML and simple CSS. In reality what happens is that companies trade control for speed on mobile.

I'm so scared of relying on one company for everything.

I personally run my own mail server and use Mail to move all messages to Google Inbox, so that I can use Google's excellent spam filter and email grouping while still keeping control over my email.

I use both Google Photos and iCloud Photos.

If I had to have Google proxy my website, I would at least give my visitors a CNAME instead of Google's URL, to avoid getting locked in into the technology.

I know a lot of people that would be totally screwed if Google closed their account for some reason: no more email, contacts, photos, etc. etc.

This might be worth reading: https://www.alexkras.com/i-decided-to-disable-amp-on-my-site... (on HN yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14635013)

Most importantly, it walls off a lion share of few remaining competing ad publishing platforms

Thanks, added it to Pocket.

But as far as I understand, AMP is just an open technology, i.e. open for any (search) company to implement. Google is just the company proposing the standard (and coincidentally benefiting most from it).

Proposing the standard sure, but importantly, prominently displaying it in search results.

If an AMP equivalent standard came out by Mozilla or Microsoft or Facebook, it would be an uphill task for them to get google to give those pages special treatment in search results.

Hence, there is an argument to be made about AMP being an anti-competitive (search engine dominance used to push it's own diet-html).

I'm not sure if the actual format is relevant in a court of law, as long as anybody is capable of producing the format.

For example, Google is already favoring HTML above, say, TXT pages. Demanding TXT to be shown as high as HTML in search results doesn't make much sense.

HTML is not a google standard. AMP is.

AMP is open to implement (or copy) for anybody with Google-scale datacenters, not for any company.

From the official site: "The Google AMP Cache is a proxy-based content delivery network for delivering all valid AMP documents." In other words, you are welcome to tie yourself to Google infrastructure, not merely to a proprietary software platform that you can at least use on your own (like Windows etc. in the Microsoft antitrust cases).

> AMP is open to implement (or copy) for anybody with Google-scale datacenters, not for any company.

But doesn't it hold for any market, that as technology advances, the barriers to entry become larger?

AMP is not a technological advancement: sites are perfectly able to serve lean web pages from their own server. AMP is a rather important brick in a wall of monopoly.

AMP and Android are in a separste case that's also being worked on right now, fines over 4 bln are expected there.

Do you have a source for the claim that AMP is part of the Android case, or indeed any case?

Only a mail from the EC that this is already being investigated after I filed a claim against the AMP cache granting a search ranking benefit.

AMP is the best thing to happen to Android users, I vastly prefer sites that serve AMP content to ones that don't.

Why only to android? I thought it was an device agnostic technology?

Perhaps that's up next.

Does using AMP automatically license Google to redistribute your content, or are they basically pirating?

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