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canopic jug [soylentnews.org] writes:

Web consultant Barry Adams has written a blog post about the problem with Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) [polemicdigital.com] and how to fight against it being shoehorned into the WWW.

Let’s talk about Accelerated Mobile Pages [ampproject.org], 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 [newsdashboard.com] 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 [ycombinator.com] to punish those that do not toe the line.

Earlier on SN:
Google Attempting to Standardize Features of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) [soylentnews.org] (2018)
Kill Google AMP Before It Kills the Web [soylentnews.org] (2017)

Original Submission