How does amp strengthen a monopoly position?
You are correct, most people are leaving this out. I think an emphasis on asking why Google is pushing AMP, and whether that interest aligns with consumers, would be helpful in this thread.
Is that really not obvious to some?
But the point made up-thread was that "controlling things" is not intrinsically bad. The problem was that (according to some users) Google was abusing a monopoly position to control things in a way that would be beneficial to itself, but harmful to others. The question the parent to my comment was asking was, beneficial to itself how? You saying that Google is "controlling things" just takes us back to where we started, but doesn't answer the question of what Google stands to gain.
Let me give an example. Suppose by "controlling things" you mean incentivizing ("""forcing""") web developers to create pages that are better because they have lighter scripts and higher security standards for third party content. (In fact, this is what some supporters say Google is doing.) I don't think most people would have a problem with that. So presumably critics have something interesting to say about what "controlling things" really means that explains why it's bad in this particular case.
Well that point is wrong. If you can't see how a single, privacy abusing company having dominant control over the web is bad, I can't fucking help you.
I agree that that's bad. I also don't think you (or most people in this thread) have made coherent arguments for why AMP is helping Google do that. That was the parent comment's point, and I tried to highlight that because it's downvoted.
Note that "control things" is a different claim than "having dominant control over the web". It's obvious that in some sense Google is doing the first. It's obvious that the second is bad. The issue is how you get from saying that they're doing the first thing to saying that they're doing the second thing.
Google has a monopoly position, granted. But not everything a monopolist does is bad just because they're a monopolist. Another example: one thing Google does is lower the page rank of sites that show the full content to the GoogleBot but paywall real users. I think this is great! It's an attempt to control the way publishers design websites and the way their servers respond to user agents, but the point of that control is making the web a better place. Many people feel similarly about AMP: that it's getting publishers to create faster pages that make the web a better place. Can you say why they're wrong?
Google has a de facto monopoly on site rankings, which gives it de facto editorial control over the content of the Internet down to a very fine level.
If Google decides to drop a site from search, that site loses traffic and is effectively removed from visibility.
This is not a user choice. Users do not to get to say "Well, that site is too slow for me, so I won't visit it again. And actually I don't like the content either."
It's not a site owner choice. Owners can't respond to user preferences by improving performance or offering different content.
It's a Google choice. And the reasons for Google's choices are typically opaque, largely unstated, and never negotiated directly with site owners.
It's absolutely unacceptable for a single unaccountable corporation to have this level level of control over global information infrastructure.
In fact the whole idea of generic but opaque site ranking is toxic to an open Internet, and always has been. The idea that page rank has some kind of objective user value - as opposed to monopoly value - has always been debatable.
It was tolerable conceit in the days of Alta Vista when search was a research project, and some level of good faith was assumed.
But Google has trashed that good faith by operating like a bad actor - and monopolist - in numerous ways, AMP being the most recent example.
So no - not generic. Not even close.
No need to judge it based on its technical merit: a significant amount of people hate it, yet here it is. End of.
This is not a legal question (yet), this is a moral question. The legal [and technical] question is relevant, but not the be all end all of any discussion. People sometimes also just want to discuss how they feel. It’s relevant to get consensus about that. And people feel bad about AMP.
That is much different than saying that Google is using AMP to make it easier to control results which was what the parent seemed to be implying. If this discussion is really not about AMP at all, but just about Google flexing their monopoly to do things customers don't want, then why is AMP the technology getting criticized for it? Why weren't we criticizing using SSL everywhere when Google depriortitzed non-SSL results?
I mean it's also naive, and wrong, but it's cute too.
No sane person on the planet would consider a person using a search engine for free, "the customer". The customer is the person who buys something - in Google's case, advertising.