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posted by on Thursday May 25 2017, @05:48AM   Printer-friendly
from the the-more-you-tighten-your-grip... dept.

There's been a good deal of ongoing discussion about Google AMP – Accelerated Mobile Pages.

Quite a few high-profile web developers have this year weighted in with criticism and some, following a Google conference dedicated to AMP, have cautioned users about diving in with both feet.

These, in my view, don't go far enough in stating the problem and I feel this needs to be said very clearly: Google's AMP is bad – bad in a potentially web-destroying way. Google AMP is bad news for how the web is built, it's bad news for publishers of credible online content, and it's bad news for consumers of that content. Google AMP is only good for one party: Google. Google, and possibly, purveyors of fake news.

[...] What it is, is a way for Google to obfuscate your website, usurp your content and remove any lingering notions of personal credibility from the web.

If that appeals to you, here's what you need to do. First, get rid of all your HTML and render your content in a subset of HTML that Google has approved along with a few tags it invented. Because what do those pesky standards boards know? Trust Google, it knows what it's doing. And if you don't, consider yourself not part of the future of search results.

Why a subset of HTML you ask? Well, mostly because web developers suck at their jobs and have loaded the web with a ton of JavaScript no one wants. Can't fault Google for wanting to change that. That part I can support. The less JavaScript the better.

So far AMP actually sounds appealing. Except that, hilariously, to create an AMP page you have to load a, wait for it, yes a JavaScript file from Google. Pinboard founder Maciej Cegłowski already recreated the Google AMP demo page without the Google AMP JavaScript and, unsurprisingly, it's faster than Google's version.

-- submitted from IRC


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  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday May 25 2017, @12:12PM (14 children)

    by kaszz (4211) on Thursday May 25 2017, @12:12PM (#515400) Journal

    So how will we screw this domination attempt?

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday May 25 2017, @12:22PM (13 children)

    Not use it.

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.
    • (Score: 4, Funny) by FatPhil on Thursday May 25 2017, @12:40PM

      by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Thursday May 25 2017, @12:40PM (#515415) Homepage
      Best of all, in order to actively, wherever possible, not use it, all you have to do is ... nothing! I'm up for that kind of protest.

      Bring me my coffee cup, someone, it's on the table next to me, IIRC.
      --
      Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
    • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday May 25 2017, @12:51PM (7 children)

      by kaszz (4211) on Thursday May 25 2017, @12:51PM (#515429) Journal

      The problem is you have hordes of idiots.. led by a group of psychopaths. But sure, maybe it's possible to make software to refuse to touch any AMP coded pages..

      • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday May 25 2017, @01:53PM (2 children)

        I meant don't code pages using it. If you don't, there's no problem.

        --
        My rights don't end where your fear begins.
        • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday May 25 2017, @02:28PM (1 child)

          by kaszz (4211) on Thursday May 25 2017, @02:28PM (#515473) Journal

          The problems comes when others do it or users demand it.

          • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday May 25 2017, @07:04PM

            by bob_super (1357) on Thursday May 25 2017, @07:04PM (#515631)

            If users demand it, remind them they're just holding their browser wrong.

      • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday May 25 2017, @09:01PM (1 child)

        by urza9814 (3954) on Thursday May 25 2017, @09:01PM (#515700) Journal

        But sure, maybe it's possible to make software to refuse to touch any AMP coded pages..

        AMP pages are served directly from Google's domain. Maybe it's possible to blacklist Google.com? Are you implying that it's difficult?

        I mean yes, it's a CDN so IP blocking it takes a bit of extra effort (That's the route I've been going), but you could easily just blacklist lookups against the domain too. If you *only* want to block AMP and not all of Google all you'd have to do is route through a proxy that filters the requested URLs; you could probably configure Privoxy to do that in a couple hours.

        • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday May 25 2017, @09:28PM

          by kaszz (4211) on Thursday May 25 2017, @09:28PM (#515716) Journal

          My idea was akin to a "usenet death penalty". Maybe it's not possible. But I got the idea when there was a craze for weird .tld's and to add to the injury puny-code to handle non-english domain names. If bind refuses them.. well no gain.

      • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday May 26 2017, @07:11AM (1 child)

        by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Friday May 26 2017, @07:11AM (#515871) Homepage
        > The problem is you have hordes of idiots.. led by a group of psychopaths.

        You should set that sentence up as a keyboard macro, because I can imagine it's incredibly useful for almost every story. I might even set it up as my signature, and then just start blank posting!
        --
        Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
        • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday May 26 2017, @10:22PM

          by kaszz (4211) on Friday May 26 2017, @10:22PM (#516166) Journal

          Just describing how a lot of problems is generated ;)
          Most people won't be very smart it's just nature or there would never be geniuses. Bell curve and all that. Psychopaths will have no problem to do anything to get power and take most risks to do that. So they end up high. The exception being when they can put a puppet in a position to sacrifice should anything go wrong. Educating the public and ensuring power sharing and rapid removal upon misbehavior should be good countermeasures. But then, who makes the rules..

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Pino P on Thursday May 25 2017, @02:55PM (3 children)

      by Pino P (4721) on Thursday May 25 2017, @02:55PM (#515484) Journal

      And watch your visitors dry up once the most popular search engines and news aggregators are boosting the visibility of AMP documents [searchengineland.com] over plain HTML documents.

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by fyngyrz on Thursday May 25 2017, @08:32PM (2 children)

        by fyngyrz (6567) on Thursday May 25 2017, @08:32PM (#515690) Journal

        And watch your visitors dry up once the most popular search engines and news aggregators are boosting the visibility of AMP documents [searchengineland.com] over plain HTML documents.

        That will only happen if there's considerable jumping on the bandwagon. If they try that without a general acceptance, their own search results will drop in quality by a huge amount, because the majority of the worthwhile pages won't be in those results. Known as "Shooting self in foot." You think they'll go for that?

        You're putting the egg before the chicken. Or something like that. Google wants this. You don't have to do this. No one has to do this. The only reason this would turn into a major screwup is if people follow Google down this rabbit hole. So it, in a small way, is up to you. Are you going to adopt these rogue tags and split the web into Googly and non-Googly for Google?

        Me... no, I'm not. Screw those guys, I'm going home. As Cartman might put it.