
Google AMP Is Not a Good Thing - danielrm26
https://danielmiessler.com/blog/google-amp-not-good-thing/#gs.IsZQ8YE
======
interfacesketch
Do we really need Instant Articles (Facebook) and AMP (Google) when we can
accomplish fast loading pages with plain, uncomplicated HTML and CSS?

I feel that many web developers don't realise that simple HTML and CSS is
often all you need to make clear, fast loading pages. No complicated tricks or
techniques required. You can make the page reasonably pleasant in appearance
too.

Think of the sites you often visit: news stories, blogs, magazine-style sites,
discussion sites. These are mostly text, not web apps.

I hope I'm not hijacking this thread, but I'd like to ask if readers find the
web page links below fast to load on their mobile phones? They don't use AMP.

I created the pages below as a test because I was (and still am) frustrated by
the slow page-loading speeds when using my phone with a 3G connection.

The page links below represent a common article/blog/report style of page.
There's about 2500+ words on the page.

The page content is CC licensed but the pictures from the original synopsis
are not included despite the references in the text (since this was just a
test)

So is it fast?

Version A: [http://interfacesketch.com/test/energy-book-
synopsis-a.html](http://interfacesketch.com/test/energy-book-synopsis-a.html)

Here is an identical version to the above but one that loads custom fonts
(approx 40kb extra). Is this slower?

Version B: [http://interfacesketch.com/test/energy-book-
synopsis-b.html](http://interfacesketch.com/test/energy-book-synopsis-b.html)

~~~
mark242
Okay but let's be realistic-- you are not a major publisher trying to make
money off these pages. You can say "yes my page loads in 100k and 300ms until
DOMContentLoaded" all you want, that doesn't change the fact that when you
slap a couple of pieces of advertising on there, it's going to slow down.

To give you an idea-- the New York Times page without any advertising on it is
2MB and has a DOMContentLoaded event at 1.29s, approximately 1 second slower
than your page. With advertising, it is 3.9MB and 1.82s.

When ad networks are able to run without almost 2MB of Javascript, then we can
talk about how AMP isn't needed.

~~~
djrogers
> you are not a major publisher trying to make money off these pages.

Hate to break it to you, but major publishers _aren 't_ making any money of
the AMP'd version of their pages - most of the monetization is stripped out,
and readers aren't even actually on their site so they won't stay and click
around.

~~~
kyrra
The spec for amp specifically has an "amp-ad" tag for displaying ads. There
are multiple ways they can be shown in an AMP page. The nice thing about AMP
ads is they will not cause the page to change layout/flow as they load. I
believe a size must be declared for ads to prevent bad behavior.

[https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/components/amp-
ad](https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/components/amp-ad)

~~~
djrogers
I didn't say they couldn't show ads, but basic ads aren't the only way that
these places monetize. Trackers, 'you might also like' panels, etc all feed in
to the overall monetization strategy. A couple of amp-approved ads on an amp-
page don't necessarily make up for all that...

~~~
rch
I'm pretty sure 'all that' is what users are trying to avoid with AMP.

~~~
Aaargh20318
I'm not trying to avoid anything. As a user I don't even get a choice for AMP
or no AMP. In fact, I changed my search engine on my phone to DuckDuckGo
specifically to get rid of AMP pages.

------
steffenweber
Google should reward fast / jank-free websites instead of rewarding websites
that use one particular technology (AMP).

On SERPs, both the "flash" icon and the AMP carousel are AMP-exclusive which
suggests that Google is abusing its market power.

~~~
xd1936
They do. They reward sites that load fast. They also offer AMP as another way
to speed sites up, which in turn makes them rise in rankings. But Google
offers a large suite of tools to help web developers speed up their websites.

~~~
CaptSpify
I hear this a lot, but whenever I search for something common like lyrics or
weather, I get only large bloated webpages, while the lightweight and simple
ones are nowhere to be found. Unless Google opens up their reasoning for
ranking, I genuinely don't believe they add enough weight to load-times.

~~~
ehsankia
Huh, what? What site do you get? I always get azlyrics which is a fairly
simple and clean site. EVery other one I tried seems more bloated.

Obviously, there's many other factors at play. SEO is a complicated world,
especially in such a crowded place as song lyrics. Though I noticed Google
actually has an inline box for lyrics now which avoids the issue entirely.

~~~
CaptSpify
azlyrics is _far_ from what I would consider simple or clean. It took over 30s
to load for me and had way too much junk on the page.

Yes, there are many factors, and I clearly don't know all of them. I
definitely see the problem that Google's inline (or amp) is trying to solve,
but I think encouraging the right sites to grow to the top is a much better
solution.

------
wffurr
I love AMP because I can easily tell which sites will actually load fast and
give me the info I wanted directly from the search results page.

Publishers are still able to track pageviews and serve ads, so I don't get
what the hullaballoo is all about here.

There's nothing in the AMP spec that stops links from working.

I just searched for "Is Google AMP a good thing" on my mobile, and got the
OP's post as the first result (probably personalized?). Had to go to the
fourth result for something with AMP, from CIO.com. The page loaded instantly,
was able to scroll without things jumping around, and the header link to the
CIO.com homepage worked as expected. They were still able to serve ads and
count my pageview too, even if I never directly contacted their server.

I just don't get what the big deal is.

~~~
mort96
I see you have never wanted to link someone to an AMP page. You also somehow
didn't notice that there's a huge useless bar at the top of the page.

~~~
wffurr
Just for giggles, I hit "copy link" in the Chrome Webview that the Android
Google Search App opened up. Pasted that into Android Chrome, and it took me
straight the AMP page, which loaded instantly and let me scroll right away.
Seems fine.

I then went to my desktop, used the Chrome history feature to open the tab
from my mobile, and the AMP URL redirected me to the publisher's desktop site,
which took multiple seconds to load and then displayed an annoying
interstitial.

If anything, I'm frustrated that my desktop browser wouldn't open the AMP page
and load and allow scrolling immediately with no interstitials.

The "huge useless bar" at the top was the exact same in the AGSA Chrome
Webview as the OP's non-AMP site. I don't know what you're on about. I didn't
notice it because it's not there.

I went and looked at the search results in Android Chrome (instead of the
Google Search app), and there was an extra bar at the top that said "From
cio.com" which disappeared as soon as I scrolled, which happened instantly
because I was able to load and scroll instantly.

~~~
bartread
I think you've hit the nail on the head there.

I _don 't_ much like the idea of AMP because, to me, it does violate the idea
of an open and free world wide _web_. But, equally, publishers have brought
this on themselves. (And I suppose, equally, it isn't the halcyon days of the
mid 1990s any more either.)

Sites are egregiously slow and heavyweight, and the experience on mobile is
often nothing short of appalling with actual content when it eventually loads
relegated below the fold, or near the bottom of the screen. You then have to
find a way to scroll without accidentally triggering an ad and once you've
done this you're likely to be confronted with one of those delayed
interstitials that are so in vogue (and so _completely_ unacceptable) at the
moment.

From this perspective AMP is kind of a backdoor to holding large media outlets
(in particular) to account for the inexcusably poor web experience they offer
to users. Because this isn't a technology limitation: it's a choice they make
in the name of monetization.

Rant over.

------
mynegation
It got annoying enough for me to switch my search to bing.com everywhere,
including Google's own browser. My two main complaints: 1. Once I am on AMP
page, most of the time I want to click around the site and I cannot do that -
feels like a cage. 2. URL obfuscates the site name and article title (not
completely, but definitely adds visual noise)

~~~
__jal
2a) I want to get to the site, not another Google property.

Penalize my search listing all you like, but none of my stuff will be hosted
elsewhere.

I thought publishers learned their lessons here - use someone else's printing
press, and ultimately, they control what's printed.

~~~
CaptSpify
This is the part that I don't understand. Why are publishers so eager to give
away control of their meal-ticket?

~~~
wmf
They can always turn AMP off if Google does something evil.

~~~
CaptSpify
And lose their ranking? It won't be as simple as "just turn it off"

------
matchu
Be sure to read Paul Bakaus's response, "Why AMP caches exist", to hear both
sides of the issue. [https://amphtml.wordpress.com/2017/01/13/why-amp-caches-
exis...](https://amphtml.wordpress.com/2017/01/13/why-amp-caches-exist/amp/)

(Though, actually, it's only a response in spirit; Bakaus's article was posted
about a week earlier than Miessler's.)

I think the problem with the AMP cache model is that, because you need to link
directly to the cached URL, you commit to exactly one cache provider. If Bing
were to also implement their own validated AMP cache for Bing search results,
you can't have one link point to both; you're either AMPed in Google results
or in Bing results, and, by being marginally bigger, Google wins _all_ of the
pie. That's no good.

How might we change the AMP standard, or the trust model around AMP caches, to
get the same performance wins while still enabling competition?

------
davewasthere
Similar to Medium, AMP encourages fast page loads and no interstitials, pop-
ups or other cancer that seems to infest the average site these days.

Yes, it may be possible to fix it over time. But I see AMP and Medium as
clean, lightweight platforms that developers/marketers want to emulate and
users will start to demand.

From a user experience, you definitely can't beat the speed of AMP delivered
content. So it's a high bar to beat. But if it forces content providers to up
their game, I see it as a good thing.

I guess the scary point, that hasn't explicitly been mentioned, is what
happens when a good portion (maybe not a majority) of content is AMP-enabled.
Is it something we transition away from, or is it here to stay? Will non-AMP,
but fast pages be second-class citizens in the new AMP-era?

~~~
stonogo
Nothing about Medium is lightweight. Consider this one-sentence article that
results in a 1.2MB pageload:

[https://medium.com/@mceglowski/chickenshit-
minimalism-846fc1...](https://medium.com/@mceglowski/chickenshit-
minimalism-846fc1412524)

There are more examples and a broader examination available from idlewords:

[http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm](http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm)

~~~
djrogers
Lucky you - that medium link was a 2.19MB download on my laptop.

~~~
bartread
That's really strange. 760KB for me, but it was a good 3 - 4 seconds before
everything had rendered. The article content was there much more quickly, but
the recommendations and responses sections below took longer to appear.

Crazy because when you look at Medium it does appear to be very clean so this
experience has certainly been somewhat disillusioning.

------
CJefferson
Out of interest, is there anyone who wants to defend the current Google AMP
(not the concept of lighter webpages, but how google has gone about it?) I
haven't found anyone yet personally.

~~~
sideproject
Just noticed a few days ago one of the major Australian newspapers started
using AMP.

I do understand the negativities around Google's AMP, but the speed was..
blazing fast.

I can't help to think that for a user who may not be familiar with all the
underlying issues, it is a pretty good user experience in terms of the speed
alone.

~~~
Accacin
I'd image they've done that because they want to get on the news carousel,and
only AMP sites appear in that. They're basically being forced to use it.

------
kowdermeister
If you share an AMP page it will indeed link to Google's CDN but if you click
it it immediately redirects to the full article on desktop:

[http://i.imgur.com/43i9X4e.png](http://i.imgur.com/43i9X4e.png)

The full URL is still part of the shared link, so not much of a value has been
lost, but the gain (speed boost) still outperforms this "inconvenience".

I don't really feel the hatred against AMP, it works as intended and for me as
an end user that's all that matters.

~~~
jansenv
I really like AMP. As a web company, it reduces our hosting costs and is a
cheater way to improve the rankings of our sites.

------
apeace
The core argument of this article is flawed. AMP does not break normal links--
although the Google search engine sort of does.

As an example of using AMP with normal links, see Cloudflare's
implementation[0]. It is possible for many CDN-like services to implement AMP
caches. Web sites link to each other normally, and mobile visitors can be
served the AMP version.

Remember that AMP is an open standard and accepting pull requests[1].

> Who (other than Google) can possibly see this as a good thing?

Users want faster pages. From all these AMP critics, I have never heard an
alternate solution, or even an idea, of how we can streamline delivery of
article content.

AMP is imperfect. But it is a step in the right direction _for users_. Critics
need to step up with a better idea, or maybe some code, and quit with the (in
this case, unfounded) rhetoric.

[0] [https://blog.cloudflare.com/accelerated-
mobile/](https://blog.cloudflare.com/accelerated-mobile/)

[1]
[https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml](https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml)

~~~
RodericDay
here's the idea: give pages amp ratings purely based on full-load page-speed.
amp pages get it, vanilla hackernews gets it too.

~~~
apeace
IIRC Google already does this. But it doesn't solve the same problem as AMP
does.

With your solution, site A can load at 2s and site B at 3s, and site A will
win. With AMP, sites A and B can both load in 200ms by easily integrating with
an open standard.

Also: all this talk of "lock-in" and "centralization". With the approach you
proposed, the publisher with the most money to spend on dev resources wins the
highest search ranking. Isn't that counter to decentralization? Isn't an open,
simple standard like AMP a better solution (though not a perfect one)?

What I'd like to hear from an AMP critic is: how can we achieve what AMP
achieves--lightning-fast speeds that users love--without the "evil" AMP
approach?

~~~
RodericDay
really? cause I don't see any discrete indicator that this page loads blazing
fast. just rankings.

meanwhile, people itt are claiming that they deliberately seek out the little
thunderbolt as proof of quality. why can't the little thunderbolt be awarded
to HackerNews too, even outside the AMP ecosystem?

~~~
apeace
That's a fair argument. Since this page loads as fast as AMP it should get the
same nice thunder bolt.

But that's different from the argument being made in the article, which is
that AMP as a performance booster is "bad" because it "breaks links".

~~~
RodericDay
well, I'm no genius, this surely came up at Google. the real question you
should be asking is why Google didn't do it this way.

This is what a lot of people are worried about.

------
jstewartmobile
AMP has been a blatant power-play from square-one. It's nice to see it being
called out on a site as prominent as Miessler's.

------
superkuh
Cloudflare is doing this AMP crap too. If a cloudflare user enables AMP on his
site then links from their domain to yours will trigger a visit of Mozilla/5.0
(compatible; Cloudflare-AMP/1.0;
+[https://amp.cloudflare.com/bot](https://amp.cloudflare.com/bot))
AppleWebKit/534.34" which then mirrors the content from your domain and re-
hosts it on Cloudflare servers.

Then whenever someone goes to the Cloudflare user's website and clicks a link
to your website they'll instead be fed a version of the page from Cloudflare
and you'll never see that traffic.

And since you (or me, in this case) don't have a Cloudflare account you can't
get any response from Cloudflare support to get them to stop re-hosting and
serving your content from their servers.

~~~
fivre
Requests from non-user accounts do still get responses, just not quickly. You
may have more luck with Twitter.

------
dccoolgai
I remember when Google had a really awesome thing that provided great content
experiences: It was called Google Reader. I wish they would take some of the
energy they are using trying to force AMP down everyone's throats and just re-
launch Reader.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
And the beautiful thing is, RSS feeds load quickly with no scripts, embedded
ads, or tracking, and isn't tied to any proprietary cloud service provider.

More and more I am convinced Google convinces everyone to move away from
things just so they can "reinvent" them down the line in a more proprietary
fashion.

~~~
mikewhy
There totally are RSS feeds with ads and tracking.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
I mean, sure, you can put like... text ads in an RSS feed, and I'm sure you
can throw a tracking link as a link to click on in there. But unless you click
into the page from the RSS feed, you aren't going to be picking up any stray
cookies or have any scripts running on your computer. Browsing an RSS reader
is very fast, and has very little bloat.

------
nachtigall
AMP is about lock-in. I'll just leave this here:
[http://robert.ocallahan.org/2014/08/choose-firefox-now-or-
la...](http://robert.ocallahan.org/2014/08/choose-firefox-now-or-later-you-
wont.html)

------
moomin
And another thing: it breaks the iOS reader feature, so it's frankly worse
than the full fat page.

~~~
mikewhy
Reader is working fine here. Do you have an example where it's not?

~~~
moomin
You're right. Looks like it's been fixed at some point since I stopped
clicking on AMP links.

------
ariwilson
The reaction to AMP is a perfect example of when the things users/publishers
care about differ greatly from developers. Users don't care about being on the
publisher's site vs. Google's but do really care that that their low-to-medium
end phone from 2014 can load the article in <5 seconds on a slow 3G
connection. Publishers care that all of their tracking and ads are working
properly.

------
Zikes
AMP specifications allow for other cache servers, of which CloudFlare[0] has
recently implemented one. You could implement your own if you like.

AMP also specifies that the canonical page URL should be used when sharing,
though the cached URL is currently what's shown in the browser. Their last
developer update[1] said they're working to address this, however for all
relevant purposes Google's own systems already currently consider AMP traffic
and results to be attributed to the original source.

[0] [http://www.businessinsider.com/cloudflare-adopts-google-
amp-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/cloudflare-adopts-google-amp-2017-1)

[1] [https://amphtml.wordpress.com/2017/01/13/why-amp-caches-
exis...](https://amphtml.wordpress.com/2017/01/13/why-amp-caches-exist/)

> Google amends its cached AMP search results with Schema.org and OpenGraph
> metadata, so posting the link to any platform that honors these should
> result in the canonical URL being shared.

~~~
kyrra
There is a decent amount of documentation about how the AMP cache works here:

[https://developers.google.com/amp/cache/overview](https://developers.google.com/amp/cache/overview)

------
wenbert
I feel sometimes the web is going in circles.

A) First we had simple web pages B) Then people want to do fancy stuff on it.
It became slower C) Back to A

Instead of going back to "A", it seems like there new are ideas are coming out
(like AMP) but in the end, I really wish we would just go back to "A". HTML is
HTML.

~~~
tdkl
The company who is selling you the B+ package (ads, tracking) now reinvented A
to leave the same + "features" intact.

------
amiga-workbench
AMP is exactly what our industry deserves for doing such an awful job in
regards to performance for so long.

------
meerita
Just adblock and you will get a fast browsing experience. The biggest problem
is not web development, but the advertising framework that is installed
nowadays.

------
27182818284
There is a lot of hostility lately toward AMP it seems like. I personally
really enjoy it and have found myself now choosing AMP articles over non-
article because I know the mobile experience won't suck.

One thing I noticed in the author's post: The author mentions that "The
content loads off of Google’s own server, not from the website itself." I
don't think that is correct unless you use choose to use the AMP-cache. For
example, if you

    
    
        curl https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/23/donald-trump-first-orders-trans-pacific-partnership-tpp
    

You get back the content such as "Nancy Pelosi, Democratic..."

------
manigandham
AMP is a terrible idea. HTML is already very fast, if it's just kept lean and
clean.

Creating a new fork of HTML only means less resources for publishers to spend
on their existing sites, creating an ever-increasing divergence in experience.
Google already had a great way to enforce better performance by taking it into
account for search rankings - which it already uses as we've seen just a few
days ago to discourage popup modals.

Another issue is that Google's adtech software is the most popular across the
web and one of the primary reasons ads are slow in the first place. They've
made improvements to speed up ads but they again hold an incredible amount of
leverage to force better practices like smaller assets, less JS, async
loading, https, no flash, etc and yet still havent don't anything about it.

It seems like AMP was some small side project that's easy to praise and get
attention without actually fixing any of the root causes for the web cruft
issue, ultimately hurting everyone in the long run.

------
throw2016
This is probably the 5th article on amp in the last few days but its already a
reality so it would perhaps have helped if this intense focus was put much
earlier.

A large number of mainstream sites are already on amp. The rest will
inevitably be forced to follow. It's done.

It's a clear abuse of power by Google which would ideally be illegal given its
near monopoly search position. Trading convenience for a lock-in is an
extremely poor tradeoff in the long run and its a miracle no legal action is
in the offing. This is the negative outcome of capitalism, concentration of
power which inevitably gets abused.

------
anigbrowl
When i got a Nexus One way back when, it had a news app that preloaded the
news with 4-8 paragraphs of plain text and a single photograph. It was great,
I could catch up on the news while I was standing in a checkout line or
similar short time-wasting situation. AMP gets somewhat back towards that, but
it's still slow and unresponsive by comparison.

Google doesn't get news. The people who work on google News clearly don't
consume it, barring the unlikely possibility that they're masochists who enjoy
making everyday tools work more and more poorly.

------
mrfusion
The other problem with amp is that it's really hard to share an artical.

I was reading one on google news and I wanted to share it with you guys but I
couldn't figure out how to get a URL for the story.

------
thecourier
I have been suffering with AMP. try to share a link to an article and you
current url is an AMP url. if the site didn't make a hard link in the post
title, you are gonna have a bad time.

------
newsat13
Just like we have made silos on the mobile market, the internet will slowly
get it's own silos. For people to value decentralization, they need to be
shown direct and observable value. Just taking a moral/ethical stand is not
enough. This is the case with anything and not just technology. The cars and
the phones we use probably enslave chinese and kill polar bears.. but for all
what the general population cares those things don't exist/happen. This comes
down to human nature.

------
IgorPartola
It is one of the most annoying things to use, and might actually get me to
switch my default search engine. I often search for stuff where the results
come up on Reddit. I want to see the comments, but AMP helpfully hides all
replies, and only shows like the top 5-10 comments. This is useless. So now
instead of getting to the page I want right away, I have to scroll down to the
button that says "see more comments". WTF?

~~~
makecheck
If you use DuckDuckGo you can include "g!" in a search to Google it instead
(except in a way that does not return AMP results).

------
mark_l_watson
AMP is probably good for web users. However, I believe that AMP goes against
the free and distributed spirit of the web.

I am somewhat a Google fan, happily paying for music, tv shows, movies, and
use the Google cloud platform. I also get some value from Facebook.

That said, I think that Google and Facebook are going to eventually badly
damage the web, or at least the web that I love.

------
awqrre
Google started stealing content a long time ago on their search page...
sometime displaying almost whole pages of content as the first "search result"
so that the user doesn't even need to visit the source.

~~~
madeofpalk
Does it count as stealing if websites opt into it?

~~~
tdkl
Some call it "SEO optimization" I call it extortion because they'll get better
ranks and a "carousell".

------
forgotAgain
This is a classic embrace, extend, extinguish.

------
inian
We need tools to help developers build fast websites. If all websites were as
fast as AMP and Instant Articles, these platforms would become obsolete. It is
in our hands as developers to take back control and make the web as
decentralised as possible.

------
sfifs
AMP is not good thing says the guy making money off ads on his personal
website and wants the ability to track users.

What about the value of seconds amd bandwidth saved for millions of people who
get pages a bit faster due to a project like AMP?

------
amelius
Can't Google just penalize slower-than-necessary pages in their search
results?

------
PascLeRasc
It doesn't seem like the author says _why_ they think it's bad that Google
stores articles on its own servers, just that everyone should know already.
Not very convincing.

------
ptasci67
I don't think this post really articulated any concrete reasons why AMP is
good or bad. It just said it is.

~~~
ksk
I saw several.

1\. Single point of failure/control 2\. It's a retraction from the web's
inherent uhhh 'webby' nature where you can link to any content. 3\. Google
wants to become a 'toll booth' on the internet where it inserts itself between
users and content.

As an aside, I think people do sense a bit of hypocrisy from a lot of
"benevolent" companies like Google. They're all open and standards-y when its
about commoditizing a sector in which they don't have any direct financial
interest. But they're fiercely closed and proprietary when it serves their
interests.

------
gotofritz
I hate AMP because I can't bookmark nor email the URL to someone unless

------
brilliantcode
While the article is correct that there's a big conflict of interest emerging
in terms of privacy, it will be exactly like the reaction we've had to all
other news of violations on the internet. We've got people with remote
controlled submarines siphoning data from the pipes. Yet no outright revolt.
People just aren't able to fathom the compromises without the technical
framework that most HN'ers have to be able to catch these things in the app.

I'm sure 16 years ago we argued that Google eating up search market would be
bad for consumers. People gladly voted Google while ditching Yahoo, Altavista,
and other search engines for Google. It will be the same case for AMP or
PWAMPs (Progressive Web App + AMP), they are here to stay.

So yes, while you can put a sticker with "AMP? Not in my backyard" on your
laptop, but the vast majority of consumers _simply don 't care_.

We are all self serving bunch. Unless more is done other than writing articles
and sharing, the status quo will be whatever the unchallenged decides it will
be, with the money and resources to see to it. The rest of us can only vote
with our money.

The internet is not a democracy after all unless we have some type of mesh
networking using our mobile phones, is coupled to governments and their
willingness to keep the underweater fibre cables. Creating our own satellite
mesh network is obviously out of the question as well.

------
maverick_iceman
Strangely I don't see any amp pages if I search within the Google app in
Android but see them if search from Chrome. Does anyone know why is this
difference? How can I restore amp pages while searching from Google app?

------
ucaetano
> The content loads off of Google’s own server, not from the website itself.

It seems the author isn't familiar with how CDNs work, how they've been around
for many years and how they serve most of the data on the internet.

When you browse YT, the data most likely isn't being served by Google
directly, but by a Google-provided rack on your local ISP.

When you browse a newspaper website, it is most likely coming out of an Akamai
or some other CDN's server in your local ISP. Akamai by itself serves about
30Tbps of local traffic around the world.

And before these massive CDNs emerged, small ISPs would use caching solutions
for static content (most of the web back then).

So we've all been loading content from 3rd party servers for more than a
decade, not from the website itself. The internet as it is today is only
sustainable because of CDNs.

~~~
ksk
IMHO, the quoted statement doesn't necessarily preclude CDNs. I think you're
reading too much into the phrasing, which like you suggested, is a laypersons
view of the internet. To me, it is instantly obvious what the author meant.
The question is who controls the platform. For e.g. Are you in control if
Google chooses to datamine your readers, or if in the future Google is free to
show "suggested" content which is not your own, etc, etc.

~~~
ucaetano
> "Are you in control if Google chooses to datamine your readers, or if in the
> future Google is free to show "suggested" content which is not your own,
> etc, etc."

Just don't use Google's CDN then, use someone else's, like Cloudflare or Bing.

