Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Saturday September 08 2018, @12:45PM   Printer-friendly
from the handbasket-is-optional dept.

Web consultant Barry Adams has written a blog post about the problem with Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and how to fight against it being shoehorned into the WWW.

Let’s talk about Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP for short. AMP is a Google pet project that purports to be “an open-source initiative aiming to make the web better for all”. While there is a lot of emphasis on the official AMP site about its open source nature, the fact is that over 90% of contributions to this project come from Google employees, and it was initiated by Google. So let’s be real: AMP is a Google project.

Google is also the reason AMP sees any kind of adoption at all. Basically, Google has forced websites – specifically news publishers – to create AMP versions of their articles. For publishers, AMP is not optional; without AMP, a publisher’s articles will be extremely unlikely to appear in the Top Stories carousel on mobile search in Google.

And due to the popularity of mobile search compared to desktop search, visibility in Google’s mobile search results is a must for publishers that want to survive in this era of diminishing revenue and fierce online competition for eyeballs.

If publishers had a choice, they’d ignore AMP entirely. It already takes a lot of resources to keep a news site running smoothly and performing well. AMP adds the extra burden of creating separate AMP versions of articles, and keeping these articles compliant with the ever-evolving standard.

So AMP is being kept alive artificially. AMP survives not because of its merits as a project, but because Google forces websites to either adopt AMP or forego large amounts of potential traffic.

And Google is not satisfied with that. No, Google wants more from AMP. A lot more.

AMP is also purported to throw in an 8-second delay to punish those that do not toe the line.

Earlier on SN:
Google Attempting to Standardize Features of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) (2018)
Kill Google AMP Before It Kills the Web (2017)


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday September 08 2018, @03:50PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Saturday September 08 2018, @03:50PM (#732234)

    so arguing over whats "right and wrong" is almost orthogonal to the entire business model.

    Oh just thought of a better analogy. The whole fight is like a gangster movie where they're talking about the morality and ethics inside the business of selling heroin to kids or sex trafficking. People are kind of interested in the internal operations of organized crime very "Sopranos"-like. But its not like any level of morality and ethics in the complicated process of paying laundered protection money somehow makes the overall corrupt industry less corrupt. What are the moral and ethical issues of a whore withholding some amount of tips from her pimp, in the context of the greater sex trafficking industry as a whole, and does it really matter outside their personal transaction? Or what does it mean to be the most ethical pimp on the block?

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2