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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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 08 2018, @10:08PM
Lets say google kills this industry; have we lost anything?
They want to make it easy to sell you things. On your phone. It took a bit of doing but I think I finally got the notifications under control. Have to sit down and do the same to my wifes phone. That is fairly new. Basically they want to make it easy to scrape then be small when they bounce you off their servers.
As for what is real news. You are spot on. I would add, we asking these exact same questions in 1980 when CNN first popped up. Apparently a bunch of pundits screaming at each other over something none of us can control in 20 different ways.
It gets even worse when you dig into *how* these places are getting the news. AP/Reuters/CNNNetwork/FoxNetwork. These news services are basically how all of these guys get the garbage they serve us.
Once I learned companies and countries submitted news pieces in whole to stations to read aloud I realized our news was less than honest. It was very manufactured. Not necessarily for our own good.