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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)
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Saturday September 08 2018, @07:13PM (1 child)
FTFA :-
The GP post picked up on this point and I agree with him on it. Open source code is simply stuff that people other than those who wrote the code can read, and modify if they wish, and re-publish the modified version. It does not necessarily mean a project which has been originated by a small company or amateurs, nor one in which the work is spread around a large base, no matter how much that would give you a warmer feeling about it.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Monday September 10 2018, @01:58PM
But you have to look beyond the code and standards that they've actually released. AMP isn't just how you write an AMP website, it's also a set of standards for infrastructure to deliver that content. I can't find any open implementation of that infrastructure component though -- seems like the choices are either Google or Cloudflare.
It's the old EEE strategy. Google is already doing it with Android, and they're starting to do it to AMP as well, although they're probably waiting for increased marketshare to provide sufficient lock-in for the extinguish step. First they release AMP as an open system, then they get everyone using their own caching servers since it's their tech and their servers are free. Now their servers are starting to implement special proprietary features that they aren't part of competing servers -- if you check the pages about Google's AMP cache, you'll see sections which state "This is only applicable to the Google AMP cache". They've started to Extend and are preparing for Extinguish.