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Comment by georgeecollins | Hacker News Reader

But also a few times on this site in the past few years when someone complained about AMP, technical people on HN would also say that Google was doing the right thing to make mobile pages more responsive.

Google was saying they were trying to solve a real problem, and it isn't easy (for me at least) to have known their true goals. Now if you read the the Texas anti trust suit -- and I recommend it to anyone who is interested-- it seems pretty clear that their motive for AMP was to improve their ad revenue.

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> their motive for AMP was to improve their ad revenue

It can be both. AMP legitimately sped up a lot of crappy news sites. That put pressure on non-AMP sites to get their game together. It was probably a net positive at first. But then Google abused their position.

> But then Google abused their position

Absolute market dominance corrupts absolutely. Even, and in spite of, efforts to the contrary from within the company.

All they needed to do, in my opinion was to let it be known that sites that were optimised for mobile accessibility and fast loading would prioritised in mobile search result placement, above slow, inaccessible sites.

All they needed to do was boil the ocean.

Clearly they could since they somehow got every site on AMP…

Thats the point im making. It took leveraging search to offer premium real estate for AMP pages to force adoption. It was a compelling value prop for top publishers. Enough to boil the ocean. However, simply asking the ecosystem to build faster pages.. isn’t going to work.

Some of those technical people singing praises of AMP literally worked on it, helped it ruin the web and once finished left and renounced it: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/12/i-have-resigned-from-the-go...

I am a tech person and I have only maintained AMP is a blight. Anyone of us, with even a smidge of business sense could see what they were doing/going to do for quite some time. The people who argued for its benefits very much lacked perspective (or didn't care) outside of the immediate technical effects of speeding up mobile sites. People in tech are not particularly homogeneous in their opinions on a lot of these things and you probably saw a small slice of the various opinions.

Yeah, I saw those, and I didn't recognize any of the people, but their arguments never made sense to me, and it ended up really damaging my opinion of Google even more. What other bad things has Google done, that other people have defended, that I silently accepted without thinking it all the way through?

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