Google AMP Is a Threat to the Open Web
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From users perspective, when I see the lightning icon on my search results I feel happy because it means that the page will show me it's contents as soon as I click it.
It means that the website is not going to show me white page for 15 seconds then start jumping around, changing shape and position for another 30 seconds until everything is downloaded.
I hear all the ethical/economical/strategic concerns but the tech community resembles the taxi industry a bit, that is, claiming that a tech that improves users experience significantly is bad for the user and must be stopped politically instead of addressing the UX issue that allows this tech to exist in first place.
AMP strikes me as a clever technical solution to a problem that doesn't need a technical solution. It just needs restraint and better web development with existing standard technologies, and ideally a strong taboo on bloated web-sites.
See also two other technologies, the existences of which damn the web: Opera Mini (cloud rendering! and it's useful!), which can only exist for as long as the web is laughably inefficient, and Reader Mode, which improves modern web-design by removing it entirely.
AMP is just a way to do this properly and automatically. The Webdev community chooses to ignore the speed of the content delivery and Google seized the opportunity.
What can a modern webpage do for the user that 2008 webpage can't? For most of the web, the answer is nothing, all the improvements are about better tooling for the management(measure and monetize) of the webpage.
Nobody cares about the business that runs the website, businesses don't have god given rights to get users and make money. If some other business serves the users better(i.e. Google with AMP) they can get all the users. Who felt sorry for MySpace when getting killed by Facebook or who advocated the right of having users for Digg when everyone moved to Reddit?
Another thing is being a monopoly and exploiting that position, which is always a concern with giants like Google but at this moment with AMP doesn't seem to be the case.
Roper: So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law!
More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through
the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil
turned round on you — where would you hide, Roper, the
laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with
laws from coast to coast — man's laws, not God's — and
if you cut them down — and you're just the man to do
it — d'you really think you could stand upright in the
winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil
benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.[0]
Uber is probably also a threat to the public(apparently the people who run Uber are not very nice, remember all the scandals?) but people are so fed up with the taxi industry that they welcoming Uber to "slaughter" their local cabbies.
It's just business and that's why we don't live in a libertarian world and we have government bodies that regulate businesses.
Restraint can't appear out of nowhere, especially when bloating the website frequently works - more ad revenue, more information about existing visitors and potential new customers.
These needs won't just disappear, so yes, the problem needs a technical solution.
Rather than pushing for AMP, Google, Bing, etc. could just penalize websites (more heavily) for size in search rankings.
Remember, it's about providing a good experience to the users, it's not about choosing the losers and winners in the industry.
The taxi companies are making the same mistake against Uber, they assume that the users are an exploitable resource and want a solution that distributes this resource more "fairly to the businesses". From Uber's perspective, the users are the clientele and the resources are the cars and the drivers.
The web tech community is acting like the taxi drivers, angry that their user resource is being taken away.
Is it not obvious? It would motivate major websites to clean up their act and sort out the bloat problem, with no need for yet another web technology.
With AMP it's cheap and quick to implement, how long will it take for the websites to re-implement their codebase and all the tooling to match the performance criteria?
Anyway, you're missing the point that I'm trying to make here: It's about the user's experience, it's not about the user's distribution to businesses.
It's not your god given right to have users and make money.
Fair point - changes to Google's rankings apply more pressure to small websites than to established ones.
> it's not about the user's distribution to businesses. It's not your god given right to have users and make money.
What?
What?
Why do you think this has any connection to our conversation?
The web community acts as if the users are a commodity like oil and Google just made a change in its flow and now begging Google to make it flow like before to accommodate their business setup and promising that from now on they will be nicer to the commodity and store it in golden barrels.
I just don't buy it.
But you're talking to one.
> begging Google to make it flow like before
My understanding is that AMP doesn't necessarily impact ad revenues ( https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Accelerated_Mobil... ). If it did, it wouldn't see adoption, no?
I dislike AMP for essentially the same reasons listed in the article.
Additionally, I value parsimony, which isn't mentioned in the article. I disdain anything that further bloats the web stack. Unless there's a very good reason for a new web technology - and here, there isn't - then we shouldn't further complicate the standards or our browsers.
As for your ad revenue argument, not all the benefit from users is the direct ad revenue.
Bloat is a technical concern, but my other concerns are largely political, yes.
You seem to want to imply that this invalidates my opinion. Not so.
> not all the benefit from users is the direct ad revenue
Sure - such as readership - but which of them are impacted by AMP?
I am a user; I do not develop for the the web or operate a business that has a web presence. I hate AMP. It gets in the way of my search workflow on mobile; it fucks up links that I want to save or share; I suspect that Google intends to further reduce my ability to avoid it over time.
The way I see it, as people who have more knowledge about this domain than the average user, it's actively our responsibility to act in the best interest of the user (our parents, friends, etc.), even if said user might not appreciate or understand the effort.
In the same way that I appreciate, say, doctors actively working against stupid/pointless stuff (homeopathy, avoid vaccination), I appreciate IT people trying to think beyond the immediate convenience of AMP.
Maybe the developers themselves are more idealistic but the web based businesses themselves more often than not are quite exploitative towards the users and that’s we have this sorry state of the web in general.
If Google really cared about performance they’d reward publishers doing the right thing on their regular pages (which would benefit the web as a whole), not just those using AMP.
I understand their problem, I understand their solution. I have nothing against their solution.
But I'm freaking out that there's absolutely no way for me to compete with websites that are trafficking everything through Google, even if I create a product that's speed-wise compatible with AMP pages.
I must have extremely low standards, but I simply don't find this to be the case. A few, yes. The vast majority work fine.
This created an opportunity for Google to come in and offer this solution and now we're stuck.
They're not in any way the cause, not even a majority contributor, but look at Google's influence on frontend web development, from providing drop-in-with-zero-thought script CDN links, popularising the @font-face standard through their Web Fonts service to the point of its use being expected and non-optional in many web design teams, Google's terrible Page Speed tool favouring large complex pages over small simple ones, and the general cavalier "hey just paste this snippet of JS into your HTML, don't worry about what it does" attitude that things like GA have helped to make the norm.
Like-minded thoughts: https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2018/02/linkbait_37...
If the top 1000ish sites can make millions a year from tacking on Outbrain, Taboola, etc. and the analytics to support those revenue streams, why do they care if the page speed is 3 seconds vs 500ms?
So encouraging speed is ok to a point. Do they stop there and create AMP because Google is so invested in their ad ecosystem? Serious question, as it's hard not to feel cynical when the solution appears to avoid the actual problem. AMP seems a way of actively avoiding the issue.
It's so far beyond ridiculous that a website downloads from 30 domains, and pulls down so much JS that you have more code than an entire 16 bit OS, GUI and game, just to see one text only page.
The discussion, if nothing else, sheds some degree of light on how the AMP tech lead sees the situation.
iTunes didn’t take over any existing service or stop you from doing something you could before on the web
Open standard, opt-in free cdn, independent compatible alternatives; this does not sound like a hostile takeover of your freedom.
Slow sites can be sped up quite often with small optimisations and improvements and those improvements can be guided by Google tools but instead they're forcing their own new format in the name of speed.
Personally I'm about as hostile to Apple News as I am to AMP for a lot of the same reasons. And I also don't love Apple's embrace & extend approach to SMS.
I guess there was a time when I was concerned about iTunes and DRM and the network effects of an Apple music ecosystem, but I mostly stopped buying stuff through iTMS that I could get elsewhere about a decade ago and then largely ditched iTunes somewhere around 5 years ago after Apple had spent so much time "revolutionizing" the UI that it became a shambling horror of a guessing game rather than an experience, and AFAICT these days there's plenty of ways to use Apple devices for listening to music without using any of their specific apps/services.
So, yeah, I'd guess there's probably a concerned audience that isn't exactly picking on Google while giving Apple a pass.
Its the same reason why Apple never gets slapped with monopoly charges. You have the option of using Android for your phone (ignoring the fact that if you value your privacy you don’t) and Windows/Linux.
You have the option of using Android for your phone
iTunes has been selling non DRM music for a decade and you can transfer most purchased movies to other services using Movies Anywhere. The podcast directory is just that - a directory to podcast feeds. They don't host any of the podcast and provide an API.
Messages interoperare with standard SMS, MMS. You don't get all of the non standard features.
https://timkadlec.com/remembers/2018-02-14-the-two-faces-of-...
More: https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2018/02/linkbait_37...
If most people don't care about their data and the security of the web, you can't make them.
Definitely one of the threats to the open web would be the web platform falling behind "native" platforms such as mobile platforms. 10 years ago it seemed that native apps are dead, the web is going to win. And then the rise of smartphones has brought us back to a world where we are forever installing native applications. From what i can see, attempts to make the web faster (SPDY, AMP), safer (Certificate Transparency), more open (AV1) are all initiatives i can get behind. The question is : What are other companies doing to ensure the web retains its place as the premier open content / application development platform.
And isn't there more of an incentive towards structuring the web coming from these big players as well? Google and Microsoft (and Yandex) created Schema.org, and are all giving them a priority in this switch from search results to instant answers.
I guess my point is to say that the companies that are locking the web are somewhat playing on both fields and giving webmasters products that are truly improving the web as well. It's far from being a one-sided battle.
AMP seems to be an attempt to keep the web relevant. In countries like India (where i live), most new users access the web via the mobile, and the experience can be far worse than in the west, and absent of initiatives such as AMP you will see a fall off in web usage in general. I am not sure how that helps the open web.
* additional charges occur when accessing information outside from the Internet hub.
Internet hub only allows storing of information which the government approves. Storing unauthorised information on the internet hub will result in your biometric account being banned for life. Access to the rest of the internet is not affected.
As user, I love AMP. It is much faster and lighter. God knows what javascript is running behind those websites that drives my CPU usage to 100%.
However, it was AMP team's conscious decision to implement handling of AMP the way they did: divs with overflow, hiding links etc.
"The AMP Project is an open-source initiative aiming to make the web better for all. The project enables the creation of websites and ads that are consistently fast, beautiful and high-performing across devices and distribution platforms."
Welcome to the world where Google intermediates all your future communication. No doubt for your own good.
I don't find user behaviour on amp harder to track than for non-amp pages. At least if you keep tracking to a reasonable level.