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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 Sunday September 09 2018, @12:16AM (1 child)
While Google does do some bad things, it behooves us to look at the bigger picture. The California network neutrality bill hasn't be signed into law yet as far as I've heard. But shortly after the legislature submitted it to the governor, there was a sudden shit ton of astroturfing about the monopoly power Google. Which is coming straight out of the telecoms war rooms via their respective propaganda minions.
Do you really not see what is going on? All of this astroturfing about Google exists to give cover for the CA governor to veto the CA NN bill, and/or to astroturf on behalf of federal vs. state litigation. The discussion about Googles intrusiveness needs to be had. But that is discussion for programmers. Not consumers, and not newsies. Putting the cart before the horse undermines the the bigger problem.
The real walled gardens exist at OSI layer 3, where overlay networks and CDN's are being used to to constrain trade and invade everybodies lives. Everything Google does above OSI layer 4, is irrelevant to any argument about walled gardens. Whatever attempts Google may make that don't leverage their CDN network, can be breached with software. And software is cheap. So even IF they are doing things that can be reasonably described as monopolistic, they are still doing it at the carrier level. IOW, stop trying to fix the second problem. You are fucking things up for the guys trying to fix the first problem.
Of all the bad things Google does, what this guy is bitching about doesn't even scratch the surface. And as much as I'd like to enumerate them, this isn't the time for that. The time for that, is ten minutes after NN is resolved once and for all, nationally.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 09 2018, @02:48AM
But that is discussion for programmers. Not consumers, and not newsies
I disagree. There are 3 sides to this discussion. The ISP the providers and the customers. Well the customers are being left to rot. While the ISPs want to double charge us. The data providers are plunging head over into stripping us of the very rights they proclaim only apply to them. BOTH sides need their shenanigans show in a bright light. Because one group sure as hell is not getting a say. We the people.