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Comment by MrStonedOne | Hacker News Reader

>211. Google falsely told publishers that adopting AMP would enhance load times, but Google employees knew that AMP only improves the [redacted] and AMP pages can actually [redacted] [redacted] [redacted]. In other words, the ostensible benefits of faster load times for cached AMP version of webpages were not true for publishers that designed their web pages for speed. Some publishers did not adopt AMP because they knew their pages actually loaded faster than AMP pages.

Vindication for everybody pointing out that amp pages don't actually load faster, they were just incompatible with things that commonly made sites load slower.

>212. Google also [redacted] of non-AMP ads by giving them artificial one second delays in order to give Google AMP a [redacted] [redacted] slows down header bidding, which Google uses to turn around and denigrate header bidding for being too slow.

Seems damning. (emphasis mine)

Wonder what all the redacted is.

Also glad to see that google's preferring of amp sites in searches is going to get them in trouble, as that was basically the primary complaint I had with it. AMP pages would show up in searches for dynamic content, despite its restriction of static pages

View on HN

I had to log into my HN account just to say HOOORAHHH!

I've been SEOing for 8 years now with endless debates with dev people about AMP. I pushed to have it simply because "if google says jump, you say how high".

There's a bunch of insane tactics with the Ads model. For example the Ads quality score which is a totally ambiguous rating out of 10. They will then rate the page based on a whole load of variables and determine the rating - if you get 4/10 you are going to be paying more for your bids due to being penalized for low-quality BUT they will still allow it.

Now trying to figure how to improve and get it up to 10/10 is an entire process in itself. There's going to be people coming out of the wood work saying that the Quality Score is easy and so on but to me is just smells of unfair practices to exploit each cent out of advertisers.

I think even those who see through Google's shenaigans continue to abide by what Google says as there's no other choice, pretty much exploitation of monopoloy powers. If anything fruitful comes out of this action, it would apply utmost to North Amercia, EU has already doing what it can, but what about rest of the world?

I mean, how many can knowingly risk loosing website from the front page if they don't use AMP or worse don't display Google Ads? How can a layman even know their website is being penalised for not doing those, whom can they complain to when anti-trust regulations are non-existant in other parts of the world and even if they exist monopolies tend to keep the bureaucrats/politicians well fed.

So yeah, HOOORAHHH! if you live in U.S.A.

Thank you for putting this out there. Google in its current form needs to go as a de facto monopoly.

I am not hating on Google, just that I hate I have no alternatives but jumping the hoops Google puts out there.

Are you wishing for other strong ad competitors? Or are you wishing for alternatives to add?

Sometimes it seems the overwhelming sentiment at HN is that ads (especially targeted ones) are bad for the world. But it seems like nearly everyone is relying on them for their livelihood.

Hard to say for definite. The problem as I see it, is that if I have to pay for ads I have no alternatives : either Google for SEO or Facebook for Social, although one could argue Twitter, Reddit, or somesuch might be a bit more competitive.

With Google there is no option. They set the rules, they own the game and I can’t spend these dollars anywhere else if wanted to. This creates an imbalance, both for Google itself and for customers (ad payers)

This is the first I've heard of that one-second delay. That's downright evil. Whoever is responsible for that should be ashamed.

[deleted]

What good do these witch hunts accomplish? Punish the senior leadership that demanded this feature

> What good do these witch hunts accomplish? Punish the senior leadership

I believe this line of thought and justification was addressed for good in the Nuremberg Trials.

That is beyond hyperbole. These are people implementing a caching feature not individuals leading human being into death camps. A false equivalency seldom matched.

>I was only following orders.

It is not an excuse. What they did sets the nature of the penalty which may or may not even come out to being a substantial punishment. That they were told to do it, and knew it was wrong, but did it anyway merely fails to absolve them of guilt.

The crimes are not equivalent, but the "I was just following orders" excuse is just as bogus in both cases.

If you believe that people are responsible for their actions, and they have a choice of what to do, then just because someone gives them an order doesn't mean they have to follow it. They could refuse. If they accept they are then responsible for their own decision and its consequences.

What if you didn't know the ultimate goal of the delay feature you implemented? The ticket could have been fairly generic/abstract.

Not at all. It was a prevalent defense there, and their view of those crimes was the the Superior Orders defense was a mitigating factor, but that the crimes were too severe to allow them to escape all culpability like that.

It was used prior, and has been used since, with outcomes ranging from being ignored to being absolved of all responsibility.

It comes down to the scope of the crime. If you helped murder 6 million people (apologies if that's not the correct number), "I was told to" is not an appropriate defense. If it's Karen's birthday and she's lactose intolerant, but your boss says to get an ice cream cake anyways, "I was told to" is a perfectly valid excuse.

Slowing down ads falls somewhere in between, but far closer to pissing off Karen's lactose intolerance than attempting genocide.

I wonder how the team adding in that extra delay justified it to themselves?

I always wonder this with things like the Volkswagen emissions cheating - how do those engineers rationalise it?

Well, working in ad-tech is pretty much bad from the get-go, this just seems like more of the same to me. To be fair, unlike VW diesels, it's also not directly damaging anyone's health, but it's still a nasty business.

> it's also not directly damaging anyone's health

I completely disagree. Have you noticed how much targeted advertising has sold out our world and affected peoples ability to rationally think?

Advertising has done more damage to people’s mental health and self-image then just about any other industry.

> working in ad-tech is pretty much bad from the get-go

No, it's the same as any other industry. A single company or negative behavior doesn't define everyone.

No, ad tech is well-known as the particularly abusive part of these monopolistic businesses.

It's a race to the bottom, and someone has to code them there. It's bad.

It's common practice in the advertising industry to exploit people's feelings of inadequacy. This is an industry that doesn't think twice about making an emotionally vulnerable teenager feel like a loser if they think it will help them sell some shitty product as the 'solution.' This is directly harming people's health.

Yes, I considered that, and I agree that it's an industry that does cause psychological harm to make a buck. But that still seems a little different than causing respiratory illness - maybe not that different, really...

With regard to particulate emissions, consider the role advertisers play in the deaths attributable to the tobacco industry. I'd wager more have been killed by tobacco industry advertisers than by VW engineers.

They justified it by earning very high salaries. Turned around, it is very difficult for a person to see a problem, if their salary depends on not seeing the problem.

I have worked in ad tech. Can confirm

Not even that: a culture where you are expected to meet your goals, deadlines and performance criteria can lead to shortcuts and ethical breaches when the company is relying on you "making it happen".

For an engineer the end justifies the means when it involves putting food on the table and ensuring there's a roof over your families head - whistle-blowing is not an option, and quitting mid-project is never a good look either.

> For an engineer the end justifies the means when it involves putting food on the table and ensuring there's a roof over your families head - whistle-blowing is not an option, and quitting mid-project is never a good look either.

Every time I hear this ... no. Google engineers could get a job elsewhere easily. It is not like software engineers would be like miners in dying industry struggling to survive. We are well paid and can get jobs easily.

I am not saying that everyone should leave Google. I am saying that if your company demands something unethical from you, rationalizing it through "ensuring there's a roof over your families head" is just lie for most of us.

"I wonder how the team adding in that extra delay justified it to themselves?"

A nice fat paycheck will often be enough to quiet a lot of people's doubts. And if it still bothers them, they can make themselves feel better by donating some of the money to charity.

Also, people who do things they know are wrong can mollify their consciences by comparing themselves to people who do even worse, and then patting themselves on the back for not being as bad.

They think things like, "at least I'm not literally robbing anyone", and the robbers think, "at least I'm not physically hurting anyone", and those that hurt people think "at least I'm not killing anyone", and then killers think, "at least I'm not torturing anyone to death," and the torturers tend to have some excuse too, like doing it for the greater good.

Unless you are literally the worst of the worst there'll always be someone worse you could compare yourself to and think that at least you're better than them.

There are already some examples of this kind of justification in this very thread.

"These are evil, vile people I am torturing to death. In fact, it's debatable if they're even people!" tends to be the justification, and it tends to be based on mental gymnastics surrounding some old book :-/

I see your point, and I agree. "In the end, it's better for the consumer this way, we're just giving the process the tiniest of nudges." has fueled a lot of anti-consumer hogwash over the years, I'm sure.

The design of it was discussed in https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/3133. It wasn't done nefariously. AMP prioritizes the page content and verified elements first over non-AMP content (including non-AMP ads).

I read this and it was interesting and clarifying. As an aside, I still hate amp though

This is interesting and sounds eerily similar to the justifications made by the anti-net-neutrality lobby: "Here at Comcast, we're not penalizing your content, we're just prioritizing traffic from our Valued Partner sites..."

I've worked at a startup in the past where the design team requested we put artificial delays / fake progress bars in. I told the design team that 1) Its just bad design / hostile to our users, and 2) that I'd quit before I'd build it for them.

It's a hill I'd be happy to die on. I feel like 6/10 engineers wouldn't care to have that fight, let alone risk their job over it. I'm lucky to be in a position that I am even able to. So many are not. Yet another example for the banality of evil.

Tip of the hat to you

I agree, I've heard of artificial delays being introduced because some loading of things was deemed 'too quick'- something about the user expects some delay and anything quicker than that gives the feel that nothing has really happened. I can see the logic in it a wee bit, I'll try find a link to their thinking on it.

If they have to add something, add an animation.

Artificial delays and user satisfaction (with focus group testing) were discussed in this podcast episode:

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/wait-wait-tell-me/

Almost all JS ads have a render delay of ~1 s to avoid page layout issues.

In this case they are using the same approach for HTML/JS ads on AMP pages, but if they know it's AMP they don't need to.

So I dunno - from an engineering point of view it seems pretty well justified to me.

It looks to me like the design for this was https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/3133

(Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, and I'm friends with some of the people at the link. Speaking only for myself.)

So tl;dr: Traditional HTML+JS ads have always needed an extra second delay to load because of cross-domain UX degredation, but because AMP is pre-caching pages, they're able to pre-cache the ads too?

Is that what I'm reading?

I believe that the idea is that if the ad is amp, you can be sure it will load fast and not impede the ux of the page, whereas if it's html/js, you can't. It isn't about whether it is cached or not.

So taking websites hostage and demanding a ransom in the form of an amp link. Thanks.

If the top-line goal is to make the page as responsive as possible, I'm a little stumped as to what the alternative would be beyond delaying the loading of arbitrary html and JS. Can you think of a way to load arbitrary HTML immediately and not cause any page responsiveness issues on, say, a three year old Android device?

But this sounds like a technical limitation that makes sense? This entire comment chain is mostly people interpreting the lawsuit as claiming this was a deliberate artificial delay for business reasons and getting outraged about that, not a technical issue.

It's a little murky. If the status quo comes with a cost, because of practical uncertainty, and you provide an alternative that eliminates the uncertainty (and the cost), and then you use the elimination of the cost to prefer your own method... at minimum, that feels "not fair."

Why would it be unfair? A lot of UI delays come from uncertainty, it’s often a significant technical issue.

Because you eliminate uncertainty by imposing your own standard, the adoption of which financially benefits you.

An unbiased viewpoint acknowledges that bad people doing bad things for selfish reasons, can have both positive and negative results.

There's further details about it here: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/3133

And yeah, it's a technical issue.

So the suit in one paragraph claims that AMP isn't faster, then in the very next paragraph says that it is faster, but that's anti-competitive?

This is answered above. It is faster for arbitrary means, nothing substantive.

Where "arbitrary" can be swapped out for "malicious" and "anti-competitive."

It’s not faster when the browser actually loads them. It is faster when google induces a delay to making it available to start loading.

The first article I found about this was https://timkadlec.com/remembers/2018-03-19-how-fast-is-amp-r..., which claims that AMP is actually faster in practice, probably mostly because it encourages good habits. Where are you seeing that it's not faster? This article is from '18 so perhaps there has been a change in how well AMP performs versus the baseline.

Also worth noting that we should probably judge AMP as a whole product. What if it didn't make things faster at all, but did make them predictable and amenable to prerendering? The product is AMP+Cache+Prerendering. Prerendering unquestionably gives huge speed advantages in many scenarios. If you don't have AMP, you don't have prerendering, which means AMP-as-a-product gives significant speed advantages, since it's on the critical path to prerendering. (All of this is of course predicated on the idea that you can't practically prerender normal HTML pages, which perhaps you can, I don't know. I'm just saying if that justification for AMP is correct, it shouldn't necessarily matter that HTML+AMP markup is not faster than HTML markup.)

Did you use Google to search for the benefits of using AMP?

Are you serious? What else would I use? But I just checked, and DuckDuckGo and Bing return the same page as the first result.

> mostly because it encourages good habits. Where are you seeing that it's not faster?

You just answered it yourself. If someone follows good habits already, then AMP isn’t faster for them (aside from Google not allowing non-AMP loads to start sooner).

Thanks for the link. Though as a Google employee you should probably refrain from any further public comments.

There's nothing wrong with a Google employee participating in a Google-related discussion (edit: I mean in an HN thread of course), same as with any company. It's nice if they say so, which jefftk did.

Edit: I misread. Corrected below. Sorry!

I'm pretty sure they mean it's a bad idea from Google's perspective, not Hacker News'

Oh, I think you're right. I'm too used to certain types of internet reflexes. Sorry GP!

I would edit your initial comment because to many it will read as if you understood it as Google’s perspective, and still Okayed

Ok, I did that. Thanks!

Nothing wrong with that, sure, but making comments related to ongoing antitrust litigation against company employing you, while not being any official spokesperson and not having your comments vetted by legal and PR, can be really, really detrimental to one's career if Google decides that it doesn't like your comments. Google is very explicit in its internal trainings to never make any public comments like that unless you're officially empowered to do so. You can say or write anything you want on HN... on the last day at your job.

Would whistleblower protections apply in this case?

No, why would they? He's not whistleblowing. The commenter even admits that he has no context on the link in question and just suspects it's what's being implicated.

I worked at Microsoft in Europe and we never had such training. Is this only in the US?

There's probably better protection against random terminations on average in Europe than in America.

Yes, in the EU employees are more protected and it is much more limited what an employer are legally allowed to do. In fact they have to prove that your intention was malicious.

Nothing wrong for HN, but definitely risky as an employee.

It seems possible that in the history of internet forums, some of them might occasionally receive subpoenas because forum members posted something essential to one side's case in some litigation. It also seems possible that some of those forums receiving subpoenas would rather not deal with the burden of responding.

I've been given formal warning for that, others have been fired. It made it front page of HN. I don't think that's wise advice in all cases dang.

Dan, that's like asking a Google employee to basically get themselves fired. It's not something we should encourage, for their own benefit.

Exactly, wouldn't want to lose those golden handcuffs :)

Is Google legal going to extend their protection to you during this?

For the parents interest can we please delete his post...don’t want to see him get into any issues

He can probably manage to do that himself if he wants.

Do I understand correctly that the 1-second delay existed in both AMP and non-AMP case? And later, someone found a way to remove the 1-second delay for AMP since it could be done without a negative UI impact (unlike for the non-AMP case)?

That seems more likely than complete malice.

People are way too quick to defend Google around here - and I'm saying that as a former Google evangelist.

Google does a LOT of crap like that these days. Most people just aren't aware just how "evil" they've become, or prefer to defend them with nonsensical arguments like "see, Google still throws the Don't Be Evil motto somewhere at the very end of their multi-page work of conduct document, so technically they still believe in it!"

Yeah... They aren't the same Google of 20 or even 10 years ago...

>Whoever is responsible for that should be ashamed.

Isn't it the CEO?

more than likely a single "Rogue" engineer

This was sarcastic, right?

Someone’s gotta be the scapegoat...

Obviously yes, probably on the back of stuff like Jerome Kerviel, and Tom Hayes, where one "rogue X" is capable of taking down Y.

"air quotes"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_quotes

You mean scapegoat?

The engineer is responsible for it. The CEO is accountable for it.

No. It’s the board of directors. The board of directors is by proxy of the shareholders, is the actual owner in a practical sense of a corporation.

The CEO can, in most cases, be removed at any time by the board and be replaced by someone else. Without the boards approval none of this can happen.

So if you need to blame someone. It’s the board of directors.

Completely wrong, doesn't even make sense. You can easily have BoD individuals with tiny minority stakes in corporations. Sorry to be abrupt, but I really just don't advise making huge sweeping statements on things if your take is just blatantly wrong and misleading.

Who votes to hire or fire the CEO?

the BoD, next question?

So then how is this the CEO when the board actually controls who the CEO is? The CEO is employed by the grace of the board. The performance and decision making of CEO is implicitly approved or disapproved by the board of directors decision on a rolling basis to maintain or terminate the employment of the CEO. The same CEO that meets with the board on a regular basis to answer questions and provide updates .

Larry and Sergey

The personal stake of BoD individuals is completely irrelevant, and your focus on that suggests you don't understand what "by proxy" means.

> This is the first I've heard of that one-second delay. That's downright evil. Whoever is responsible for that should be ashamed.

That's it. I'm putting a 1-second delay into my webserver right now, when it detects Google Chrome.

This idea is one github repo away from being viral.

That'll probably just get you penalized by Google Search...

This whole AMP mess just shows how insidiously evil a HugeCorp can be through sheer system complexity. Was it intentional? Well, I guess court cases will show that, but sheesh... even if unintentional it's extremely chilling.

> That'll probably just get you penalized by Google Search...

Then don't add it for Googlebot User-Agents or IPs.

Google probably crawls with non-Googlebot User-Agent strings periodically to test if sites are serving different content to Googlebot and regular browsers.

But this mitigation would still fail. They might test for different content, but they probably don't include a periodic test like this in their timing tests, and if they did, it would just be an outlier.

I have no insider knowledge, but I'm going to guess that they even crawl using actual Chrome browsers once in a while... and penalize deviations from what you serve to the GoogleBot... and also factor in response times for either.

I don't think any single person can predict/know what's actually going on at this point.

In google search console, you can see lighthouse data reported from actual google chrome instances of real users. (I can’t verify this right now)

I think you missed my point.

If you and/or your organization can keep up with all of that... then good for you. That's not the reality for most of the world. And in "world", I include most IT organizations, btw.

EDIT: Btw, do note that I'm not even sure if the alleged issues/problems are even intentional or not... and that in itself is problematic... which was my larger point.

I don't have any solutions.

That's not sufficient. Google checks for different behavior for sites read from Google and sites read from other sources.

They'll drop content like a rotten egg from search results of they see a discrepancy.

Yeah but I really doubt they're using latency discrepancy as a signal. I can think of plenty of ways poor latency could come up on their verification requests but not affect the normal Googlebot requests. Also that's not really something any black hat SEO would involve so Google doesn't really have an incentive to look for that in the first place.

With the upcoming Core Web Vitals, you'll get penalized for this. It measures the aggregate speed of chrome users.

This is already a prominent section of Google's search console and they fire off warnings with with the perceived issues which you validate after fixing, etc. I'm sure it will become a major factor very soon.

> That'll probably just get you penalized by Google Search...

How about a pop-up telling the user that the UX of this website is better on Firefox? (which is true because e.g. it will not show the annoying pop-up)

I'd turn it on for lulz on my personal stuff but yeah it will hurt my domains more than Google's reputation...

I also think that we should collectively fight back against Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple.

Not handing them data for free would be a start (Analytics & Gmail)

Before jumping to conclusion me might have to hear the other side as well.

Karishma, you were shadowbanned. I've seen nothing in your comment history which would warrant this so I've vouched this comment.

Reminds me of this story: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Speedup-Loop

Such artificial delays are already intentionally inserted for the purposes of allowing header bidding, regardless of AMP. Are most users aware of that. What this alleges Google is doing with AMP is making the delay worse, but there is still a delay. This is part of the price the user pays for online advertising. Not just (potential) visual distraction of advertising, but (real) time waiting for advertisers to bid before an ad can be shown. (What does a message like "Page loading..." really mean. Imagine if the message was "Advertisers bidding...") Advertisers might fail to get the user's attention or click, but they are always successful in stealing the user's time, with help from "ad tech" companies like Google. Regardless of whether the user ever looks at the ad, or clicks, she still has to wait for header bidding to complete.

The problem here is that there allegedly an additional artificial second of delay on non-amp ads vs amp ads. This is seen as anti competitive.

I am overjoyed that Google is finally getting payback for AMP.

Small sites don’t have the resources to support it, and are therefore at a major disadvantage compared to the big clickbait news factories, who of course have the resources to build entire second versions of their pages for AMP.

Meanwhile, if you don’t comply with Google’s AMP demands, you likely wont appear in the “articles for you,” suggestions every time you open chrome on mobile. Nor will you be featured in certain content carousels on Google search. This can amount to shutting off 30% or more of your traffic.

If Google wanted to make the web faster, they could have just tweaked the search algorithm to more heavily favor faster sites. Problem solved.

Google can only force the adoption of AMP because of their monopoly power. They claim it is an “open source” project but this is questionable. 90%+ of commits are Google employees. It’s not like “the community” designed it or has any power to change it.

I always cite AMP as the most cut and dry piece of evidence that Google is a harmful monopoly. I continue to be astonished that higher ups at Google ever greenlit the idea in the first place.

I love Google and what they’ve done for the internet, but it’s clear they need to be reigned in.

It's worth mentioning that AMP intentionally adds an 8-second blank page delay if you are blocking Google's third-party js.

I think that was intentional malice designed to get some high-bounce rates for non-amp to have something to point at for publisher. See, over there - w/o AMP you have ScArY nUmBeRs

Yeah. If you block all js, the blank doesnt occur. It's just when you block google js.

It also creates blank layers above the actual content.

have noticed this with a growing number of websites; they load fine/fast if you block .js but show a paywall/annoyification when .js is enabled... "if you insist"

I'm glad Google is being investigated, and I am even more glad AMP could be going away. It completely ruins mobile experiences because it blocks preferred apps from opening their respective URLs.

What do you mean by this?

When you click an Amazon link in Chrome, it usually opens the Amazon app if you have it installed.

However when you click an Amazon link, if it uses AMP, it usually opens google.com/amp/amazon.com meaning chrome doesn't know it has to open the Amazon app

Note: Amazon doesn't use AMP, just an example.

I hate when web links try to open an app. If your product is an app, I refuse to use it. So no harm no fowl, for me at least, here.

When I’m in the browser, I prefer to stay in the browser. When I visit amazon.com I don’t want the app. I wish there were a way to disable this behavior on a domain by domain basis.

I like how Firefox for Android does it: "Open in App" is the first menu item when you're on a site that has a matching app installed. Best of both worlds: user retains control of their app / browser experience, and can easily opt in to using the app.

Somehow it always opens Google Drive app wherever I try to open https://drive.google.com in Incognito mode in Firefox for Android. In hate it very much and it doesn't even ask me. (I'm not authenticated with that account on device, so it makes impossible to access documents without login on Android)

This indicates that the app claimed the URL, so to prevent that you'd need to go into the app settings (at an Android level) and stop Google Drive from claiming those URLs.

Ohhh man! You are awesome! Thank you 10000!

On Android, You can open settings > Apps and notifications > Amazon > Open By Default > Clear Defaults. Then set 'open supported links' to 'dont't open' or 'open'

When a universal link opens an application, there should be a link in the top right of the screen to open it in Safari. If I remember correctly, when you choose this option, iOS will save your preference and stay in Safari instead of opening in that particular application in the future.

> Seems damning.

The claims in a lawsuit aren't doing their jobs if they don't seem damning.

> Also glad to see that google's preferring of amp sites in searches is going to get them in trouble

Presuming the outcome of a lawsuit from the fact that it was filed may be ill-advised.

Entirely aside from the merits, I'd be so happy if this lawsuit somehow resulted in the destruction of AMP.

> they were just incompatible with things that commonly made sites load slower.

I always thought that was the entire point.

The primary upsell I always heard on here, and I think google's pages on it, was that it could be prefetched without exposing the user's info to the publisher if the user didn't click on it (because it's hosted on google's servers), and the prefetch was what made it faster, as well as being hosted on a cached cdn network.

The things that make sites slower are ads. And 90%+ of those are served by Google which runs the biggest adserver on the internet.

AMP is Google solving for performance from itself, and costing a lot of time and effort for everyone else to deal with.

Aren't AMP pages able to be preloaded while you're at Google before you click on the link? I thought that was half the point of them. I can't see how that couldn't reduce loading times.

AMP pages artificially delay the loading of non-AMP elements, including non-AMP ads by 1 second.

This means if you want AMP, you better switch to an AMP advertising network. Who makes AMP advertising networks and also gets to make the rules about amp.js that changes behaviour, and adds in arbitrary restrictions (like a 8 second blank page if you block Google's tracking javascript) at will?

How many Googlers knew this and kept quiet? They should be named, shamed and then shunned.

This should be criminal, if it isn't.

That one second delay is straight up evil. Extremely shitty, unethical behavior.

A Google employee commented above about the design reasoning behind this, and it's worth reading and understanding the linked GitHub discussion:

> It looks to me like the design for this was https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/3133

To be clear, I'm not defending Google here, but I just want to point out that it's possible to be "evil" (for whatever that means) without being malicious. That is, I don't think any Google engineer was thinking "Haha! We'll slow down all those non-AMP ads deliberately!" The thinking seems to have been "We want to be somewhat 'backwards compatible' to allow non-AMP ads, but we don't want those ads to kill AMP's performance benefits, so we'll still load them but only after the AMP content has loaded and rendered."

However, this is exactly the mindset that I hate about AMP, and it drives me a little nuts when I see Googlers defending it. I get that your intentions are good, but don't you realize that it's not an accident that the primary beneficiary of AMP is Google, e.g. by keeping users in the SERP instead of going off to sites where the content is hosted, and by making everything ideal for the ad network you own? Googlers have to come to realize that essentially all of their engineering decisions are constrained by what makes more money for Google, not what is best for users. Sure, faster page loads are great, but do you honestly think Google would have supported a tech that made page loads faster ig it didn't cause people to look at more Google ads? I mean, if Google really supported what was best for users, they'd support more privacy controls a la what is coming in iOS Safari, but of course they don't because that's bad for their business.

I hate AMP and hope it dies, but I don't hate it because I think there aren't some user benefits to it, I hate it because it is a further attempt by a single company to own even more of the Internet.

>We want to be somewhat 'backwards compatible' to allow non-AMP ads

It requires some pretty absurd mental calisthenics to be able to see AMP as an upgrade on the open web.

Can you elaborate? The argument is that AMP is part of the open web, that it’s an open standard everyone can use and lots of people do use. That doesn’t exonerate Google for (allegedly) using anticompetitive practices to push and shape the standard, but I can’t see a critique of AMP as a project that wouldn’t apply equally well to WHATWG’s management of HTML. I think this is something where a lot of people just don’t know how the sausage is made.

The fact that google runs a cache is part of AMP, and open for criticism.

The fact that google does not let you disable AMP from your browsing experience is part of AMP, and open for criticism.

The fact that google will prefer AMP over non-AMP links even if this means looking for a newly launch site with dynamic content (that can't be amp'ed) will get buried by articles about that site because they have AMP, is part of AMP, and open for criticism.

ie: AMP the """standard""" may be good, but everything google did with AMP is fucking horrible, and utterly and irreparably stains AMP, if only for enabling these things.

And the fact that google benefits from AMP, AND also started AMP and shaped AMP, just kinda nails the argument that you can't seperate out AMP from how google uses AMP.

Im referring to AMP the caching service run by Google. That is very much a walled garden.

If they turned it off tomorrow the standard would still exist.

FWIW, I had something of an impression that Google AMP was kind of a hacky attempt to "fight back" against Facebook Instant Articles, which made browsing random news on Facebook "more fun" and faster (etc.) than using the web (and particularly Google).

It was. It is now retroactively justified as "a way to speed up web" or somesuch.

It never was more than a way to grab traffic, market and money share.

> Wonder what all the redacted is.

My guess it's related to the page rank algorithm.

google being evil here..

>>212. Google also [redacted] of non-AMP ads by giving them artificial one second delays in order to give Google AMP a [redacted] [redacted] slows down header bidding, which Google uses to turn around and denigrate header bidding for being too slow.

See comment by jefftk. Seems to explain it.

Internal Conspiracy. Rico Act stuff. Corporate criminals . . .

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