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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: 5, Insightful) by shortscreen on Saturday September 08 2018, @08:15PM (3 children)
Goog is trying (rather successfully) to turn the www into their own walled garden. See how many sites will function without recaptcha horseshit, without google fonts, without trying to contact google analytics or google tag manager or any of that garbage, in a browser that isn't google chrome or a rebadged google chrome or a clone of google chrome. Maybe there are more googsites than there are websites at this point.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 08 2018, @08:20PM (1 child)
the recpatcha is the worst
i do not want to train their computers to better spy on me via optical recognition. and i dont know why so many people are ok with training the super computer FOR FREE. At least be a bitch and sell out. but no. its mandatory to participate if I want to even create an account to review my COBRA insurance benefits for the job i left.
customer service did not even understand what my issue was. it doesn't load? it won't open? have I tried viewing it in Chrome?
but they could get me a payment table in a .csv format and so I send monthly checks and don't log in to their 'benefits' site. the captcha is required to complete to confirm i am not a robot and also save a few cookies to identify uniquely the computer i am connecting from.
yeah like I need to secure my COBRA amounts due info from other people. and then secure it again if I log in from my laptop instead of my desktop.
so yeah lots of companies are just plain fucked because they accept the google way just as there was one microsoft way. Now there's a two way street, each leading to a dead end. using an apple product still puts you on that road ahead.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Monday September 10 2018, @02:55AM
Would you prefer that an attacker on the network path between the machine sending your COBRA amounts due info and your machine be able to falsify your COBRA amounts due info in transit? Xfinity by Comcast has been caught repeatedly modifying documents in transit that are delivered over HTTP. See, for example, "Comcast to Customer Who Noticed It Secretly Injecting Code: Maybe It’s Your Fault?" by Sidney Fussell [gizmodo.com].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 09 2018, @05:55AM
Our tech masters seem to love to try owning the internet. It's been some 20 years since Micro$oft tried to do the same with Internet Explorer and non-standard web markup. And they were pretty fucking close to nailing it, much like google now is. Firefox was what saved our bacon back then, let's see who if any can help us this time.