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The problem is not that it is in their best interest to control the web, the problem is that Google seems entirely unaware as a company that others want to have a different version of our future, and that it is entirely legitimate to not use Google solutions as a foundation of that future.This is really well stated.
> As a whole company, Google appears to be somehwat autistic to me.
And... this isn't. Being proud or strongheaded, or having dysfunctional internal politics is not remotely the same thing as being autistic; let's avoid stigmatizing.
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I think that Google has a lot of self-confidence, and it bothers them that they need to do this dance with other members of the community. Google makes its own decisions, on its own, and then is surprised when other stakeholders are "difficult" and don't just go along with their vision. "Because obviously we wouldn't be proposing something unless we were sure it was the right decision, so why is everyone running around questioning it?"
That's not to say that there aren't good intentions (although it's become painfully obvious that when well-meaning employees clash with upper management on subjects like privacy or advertising, upper management will always win). But those good intentions have to be coupled with an understanding that the web is bigger and more complicated than Google is. Google isn't the web's parent or guardian, it is an equal stakeholder sitting at the table next to other equal stakeholders. It is not a laudable act of charity for Google to listen to those stakeholders or to include them in decision processes. It is expected.
No single company is ever going to be diverse enough, or smart enough, or benevolent enough to control the web. Google certainly isn't -- ignoring user-hostile groups within upper management, Google will still only ever be able to solve problems from the perspective of an advertising company.
Moving AMP to an open governance model is very positive, but doesn't get rid of my concerns about the technology. It's a very Google move to go off and do a thing despite significant criticism and pushback outside of the company, and then once they've shaped the result according to their own specifications to come back and say, "See, it's a community effort now. Why are you complaining?"
The URL stuff you mentioned is a perfect example. This is the Chrome dev team internally deciding that URLs are an "obvious" problem, releasing a browser update that acts on that internal decision, and then responding to critics by saying, "well, we're just trying to start a conversation. Let's talk about it."
That is the wrong order to use when messing with how the web works.
It's not even necessarily a question of what's specifically wrong with AMP at this point -- it's that if we were collectively trying to solve the problem of page bloat, we could probably do a much better job in general than AMP does. AMP is an advertiser's solution to web bloat retrofitted to address the broader community's criticism. So you get Javascript requirements on each page load, you get URL breakages that have to be solved by future standards, you get prescriptive metrics about what components Google thinks pages need rather than descriptive metrics about what render targets a page should hit.
Not necessarily because Google is evil, but because Google isn't the entire web and can't represent all of its needs.