I think our industry as a whole would benefit from Google being broken up.
It'd be like if Microsoft rigged Windows to run .NET applications twice as fast as anything else, and made it very difficult to open any other type of application... where second-class applications are unavailable from being found in desktop search, can't have custom icons or be in Program Files.
I don't need an intermediary popup page between me and the destination I seek.
> the real one, not the AMP one
Is that the mobile URL or the desktop URL? This problem has existed for ages. It's the user agent's problem to give a UI to share the canonical URL if that's what the user wants.
Actually it ends up being my problem. I don't want multiple versions of the same thing. AMP is yet another format and it's one that is outside of normal web browsing workflow.
Then don't make AMP, mobile-optimized web pages, RSS, Apple News, Facebook Instant Articles, etc.
If you want wide distribution, you have to support multiple formats. At least AMP, like RSS and mobile-optimized pages, is open, meaning that anybody can (and many link aggregators do) consume it.
It's also convenient Google is trying to delete the url bar and take away the only means for other sites to become a destination on mobile. Controlling all the apps and getting their 30% cut wasn't enough, they have to make it so you have no idea where you are anymore on the web so you forever stay in Google's walled garden.
Do you have the same complaint about RSS aggregators? About transit feeds? About microdata? About showing page summaries in search results? Why not? All of these keep users on the search engine just like AMP, but they give a better experience to the user. If one search engine didn't prerender AMP, it would lose users to the other search engines that do.
> Centralizing the way everyone browses the web is how censorship happens.
I can see how this applies to Apple News, which requires direct integration with Apple, but anybody can ingest AMP and the other formats I listed above, and many companies do.
> It's also convenient Google is trying to delete the url bar and take away the only means for other sites to become a destination on mobile.
This is separate from AMP, but if a user doesn't like it or anything else a particular browser does, they can easily switch to another one (as long as they're not on iOS).
This is true, but my point was that just doing that will still leave it slower than AMP, so the search engines will still prefer AMP results.
AMP pages can be safely prerendered, which is what makes all other options slower. If you defined your own HTML subset that allowed safe prerendering, you will have simply reinvented AMP, and you might as well contribute to the AMP project instead to get all the existing search engines to use it.
If you are a publisher and a big one, you have to use Google Ads Manager (formerly known as DFP) because it's the only way to have full access to Google AdExchange which allows you to have access to demand coming from Google Ads (ex Adwords).
And because they had dominant market share in all these markets, they could get to be the first in line whenever there's was a request for ad on the exchanges. This has changed recently but put simply, you can't escape the Borg if you are in this industry.
See https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-google-edged-out-rivals-and...