
Where Am I? NYTimes or Google? - rwoll
https://theinternetbytes.com/2020/07/03/where-am-i/
======
superasn
Yes this has been a big issue for a very long time now. Google wants to push a
release where it will display the hostname of the amp site even if the content
is being served from google.com[1].

Mozilla (and Apple) are strictly against it and thank god for Mozilla. If
Google had a bigger market share this would already be something we would have
been living with. I'm sure there are better sources for this, but here is the
first result:

[https://9to5google.com/2019/04/18/apple-mozilla-google-
amp-s...](https://9to5google.com/2019/04/18/apple-mozilla-google-amp-signed-
exchanges/)

~~~
Spivak
I don’t really think Google’s plan is that weird. And it would be amazing for
decentralized networks, archiving, and offline web apps. Google can’t just
serve nyt.com — they can serve a specific bundle of resources published and
signed by nyt.com verified by your browser to be authentic and unmodified.

~~~
mulmen
How does centralizing content on Google from multiple sources improve
decentralization? The web is already decentralized. That's why it is a web.

AMP is a scourge. It's a bad idea being pushed by bad actors.

~~~
amelius
Google is not a single server. Think of Google as a CDN.

~~~
oblio
So it's decentralized because Google has multiple servers? And here I was,
thinking that Google runs everything from a single IBM mainframe.

What you're saying would be described as distributed... Not decentralized.

~~~
HeWhoLurksLate
Seems to me like it's easy to forget there's a difference between those two..

------
reaperducer
People have been railing against Google's Amp on HN for years, and I think I
finally figured out what it's for.

It's Google way of combatting phone apps.

If all of the world's information — especially current news and similar
information — moves from the open web into apps, then Google can no longer
crawl, index, or scrape that information for its own use. The rise of the
mobile phone app is a threat to Google on so many levels from ad revenue to
data for training its AIs.

So Google comes up with Amp to convince publishers to keep their content on
the open web, where it can be collated, indexed, and otherwise used by Google
for Google's services like search and those search result cards that keep
people from visiting the content creators.

Google's explicit carrot in all this is the user benefit of page loading
speed. Google's implicit carrot in all of this is page rank. But Google's real
motivation is to have all of that information available to itself.

Can you imagine what would happen if content from even one of the big
providers was no longer visible to Google? New York Times, WaPo, or even
Medium? It would create a huge hole in a number of Google products and
services, make its search results look even weaker than they already are, and
cause people to look for search alternatives.

That's my theory, anyway.

~~~
hortense
Amp was a reaction to Apple News and Facebook News: using those applications
to read the news was a much better experience than using the web. Why? Mainly
for two reasons:

1/ Apple and Facebook were hosting all the content.

2/ The content did not come with megabytes of JS and other unnecessary crap.

Amp is an attempt at saving the web, and Google is interested in that for the
reason that you gave: they make their money from the web.

~~~
appleflaxen
> Amp is an attempt at saving the web, and Google is interested in that for
> the reason that you gave: they make their money from the web.

Yes; attempting to save the web in much the same way that the parasitic wasp
is trying to oviposit in your thorax and take over your behavior, in order to
save you from being eaten by the spider.

No thank you, sawfly.

------
Abishek_Muthian
I think the main issue is limited AMPCache providers and inability for the
publisher to choose their own AMPCache providers. Which is being exploited the
two search engines.

AMP project by itself is open-source and it explicitly states 'Other companies
may build their own AMP cache as well'.[1] There are only 2 AMP Cache
providers - Google, Bing. Further, 'As a publisher, you don't choose an AMP
Cache, it's actually the platform that links to your content that chooses the
AMP Cache (if any) to use.'[2]

Say, if Cloudflare provides a AMPCache and if the site publisher can choose
their own Cache provider this can be resolved effectively as AMP by design
itself is easy for a laymen to create high performance websites; of course
there is no excuse for hiding URLs.

[1][https://amp.dev/support/faq/overview/](https://amp.dev/support/faq/overview/)

[2][https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-
tutorials/learn/amp...](https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-
tutorials/learn/amp-caches-and-cors/how_amp_pages_are_cached/)

~~~
snowwrestler
Can we please stop trying to pretend AMP is some sort of community-driven open
source project? AMP was created by Google, for the benefit of Google. We are
not obligated to play along every time a company says “open source.”

~~~
eeZah7Ux
> We are not obligated to play along every time a company says “open source.”

This is the point.

People easily confuse "open source" with "free software" and "community
driven".

A lot of corporate-driven open source greenwashed the dark patterns of closed
source: centralized development, user lock-in, walled gardens, poor backward
compatibility, forced software and hardware upgrades.

~~~
Abishek_Muthian
>"community driven"

This concern has been raised time again with every major Google open-source
project e.g. Android, Chromium, Golang etc. and that concerns have helped
improve certain aspects of the project.

But, I wonder whether a huge corporate like Google can build such large scale
projects without such criticism, if the the project needs to be successful
they to gain from it after-all they are investing their employees and other
resources in it. And them being invested in it, is a major reason for adoption
by other parties and resulting in a successful open-source project.

More over, such large projects have helped overall SW ecosystem and even
startups economically. I for one would say, without such large open-source
projects I wouldn't have even been able to build products from a village in
India and compete with products from valley.

All I'm saying is, them being open-source at least helps us raise concerns and
make them take actions; being a complete walled garden and just asking to
'trust us' is much worse.

~~~
eeZah7Ux
> But, I wonder whether a huge corporate like Google can build such large
> scale projects without such criticism

Yes: they could at least develop large projects in a foundation with many
other companies

> And them being invested in it, is a major reason for adoption by other
> parties and resulting in a successful open-source project.

...and the main source of pain when the projects are "pivoted" or just dropped
due to a _single_ company business needs, as it happened many times.

> such large projects have helped overall SW ecosystem and even startups
> economically.

They hugely harmed competing projects and competing companies including
Mozilla, many phone OSes, many grassroots programming languages.

It's well known that google developed various projects to kill competitors or
buy startups cheaply and drop the project afterwards.

There isn't an infinite pool of open source developers - far from it!

Any large corporation that drains the pool to create a competitor to already
existing FLOSS projects is actively harming the ecosystem.

> being a complete walled garden and just asking to 'trust us' is much worse.

Closed source can be less harmful that fake-open source. A lot of people
actively avoid closed source and fall for the latter.

~~~
Abishek_Muthian
>They hugely harmed competing projects and competing companies including
Mozilla, many phone OSes, many grassroots programming languages.

IMO, we're the reason it failed. We as a consumer didn't buy FirefoxOS phone
over Android, iOS. We haven't adopted Firefox browser enough for it to become
have the major market share. The same argument can levelled against any
proprietary product VS open-source product.

That proves my point, being 'completely community driven' open-source project
isn't the only criteria for the success of a project.

------
twhitmore
The whole AMP thing seems anti-competitive and hostile to the open web.

It's a really bad look on Google's part to be pushing this.

~~~
raverbashing
I am conflicted

Yes, AMP is an anti-competitive move by Google

At the same time AMP is "faster" because it gets rid of all the nagware and JS
crap that the original page has.

So yeah, I don't like what Google is doing but I don't like what NYT is doing
neither

~~~
acdha
> AMP is "faster" because it gets rid of all the nagware and JS crap that the
> original page has.

AMP is faster only for poorly-optimized JS-heavy pages but the design is
fundamentally flawed to require all of its own large amount of JavaScript to
run before anything displays, whereas most of the traditional bloat doesn’t
block rendering. That means any optimized page - Washington Post, NYT, etc. –
loads noticeably faster even before you factor in how often you need to wait
for AMP to load, realize that some part of the content is missing, and then
wait for the real page to load anyway.

That design forces it to be less reliable, too: before I stopped using Google
on mobile to avoid AMP, I would see on a near-daily basis failed page loads
due to the AMP JS failing in some way and when it wasn’t failing it was still
notably slow (5+ seconds or worse on LTE). Since all of that JavaScript is
forced into the critical path, anything less than unrealistically high cache
rates means the experience is worse than a normal web page.

WPT examples:

[https://www.webpagetest.org/result/200704_GR_62165b7f695e300...](https://www.webpagetest.org/result/200704_GR_62165b7f695e30026f5ac3964d16864b/)

[https://www.webpagetest.org/result/200704_5F_f5c36a7c41cf4c2...](https://www.webpagetest.org/result/200704_5F_f5c36a7c41cf4c2429880dc1a42d4665/)

~~~
lern_too_spel
Those tests show you don't understand why AMP works. It works because it
prerendered, which is going to be faster than anything you can do.

~~~
acdha
If that were true, AMP would be consistently faster. Since anyone who’s used
it knows that it’s not, you would find it educational to learn about the
issues with detecting user intent, reliably prefetching dependencies, and the
relatively small / frequently purged caches on mobile browsers.

AMP’s design is very fragile: if you are using Google search results, they
correctly guess what you’re going to tap on before you do and your browser
fully preloads it, it _might_ be faster to run all of that JavaScript before
anything is allowed to load and render. If any part of that chain fails, it
will almost certainly be slower or, because it disables standard browser
behavior, prevent you from seeing content at all.

~~~
lern_too_spel
> If that were true, AMP would be consistently faster.

It is. AMP results load _instantly_ for me.

> you would find it educational to learn about the issues with detecting user
> intent, reliably prefetching dependencies, and the relatively small /
> frequently purged caches on mobile browsers.

And you might find it educational to learn why AMP doesn't rely on these
things. There are no dependencies that need to be fetched for the initial
render.

This idea isn't surprising. Multiple other systems use the same ideas,
including Apple News, many RSS readers, and Facebook Instant Articles. AMP
just does it in a way that isn't anti-competitive (like the former) and allows
for multiple monetization schemes and rich formatting (unlike RSS).

> if you are using Google search results, they correctly guess what you’re
> going to tap on before you do and your browser fully preloads it, it _might_
> be faster to run all of that JavaScript before anything is allowed to load
> and render

AMP doesn't rely on fully prerendering the page, only the portion above the
fold, which it can calculate because the link aggregator page knows the
display size, and the elements allowed in AMP are required to report their
dimensions. This allows multiple pages to be prerendered.

> because it disables standard browser behavior,

What standard browser behavior does it disable?

------
quadrifoliate
IMO the core point of the article is false.

> To be blunt, this is a really dangerous pattern: Google serves NYTimes’
> controlled content on a Google domain.

No, "Google _serves_ NYTimes' _controlled_ content" is an oxymoron. Google
controls the content that is served, and that's all your browser is verifying.
Google could very well make the NYTimes content on there display something
else and your browser wouldn't show a warning. NYTimes could do nothing about
that.

I disagree that this pattern is dangerous. While Google taking over serving
the world's content is hardly a thing to celebrate, _at least we 're seeing
that it's doing so here_.

~~~
rtsil
The pattern is dangerous because it trains the user to dissociate URL and
legitimate content, and the best tool at our disposal against phishing is
still the ability to use the URL to ascertain the legitimacy of a content.

~~~
izacus
URLs haven't been associated with legitimate content for a long time now,
since most of the things come from giant CDN companies like CloudFlare anyway.
What you're seeing in URL bar has very little to do with where the JS code
executed on your computer is coming from.

~~~
icebraining
Does it matter if it comes from a CDN rented by the NYT or a computer owned by
DigitalOcean but rented by the NYT?

What matters is that the domain points to where the NYT considers is the
correct source of their content.

~~~
satyrnein
With signed exchanges, the NYT is cryptographically opting into allowing
Google (or other cache providers) to represent specific articles as being the
NYT. It doesn't seem much different.

------
w-ll
The shenanigans Google been doing to the url bar is super hostile.

Trying to copy the domain of a url without the protocol just infuriates me.

~~~
sodascripts
Disable this setting in chrome by going to chrome://flags and switching
#omnibox-context-menu-show-full-urls to enabled. Then right click the URL bar
and select "alawys show full URLS"

~~~
csunbird
I think not using chrome at all is a better response then trying to use
workarounds.

------
abraham
One of the main reasons sites use AMP (listed in top sites in serps) will not
require AMP soon.

[https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/28/21272543/google-search-
re...](https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/28/21272543/google-search-results-page-
experience-load-time-contentfu-paint-layout-shift-top-stories-amp)

------
ridiculous_fish
It's wrong to trust the URL bar. For example, this search [1] has as top link
an ad that boasts "google.com", and it really is! And if you click on it,
you'll end up on a google.com site, which nominally helps with printers, but
in reality it's a tech support scam.

So much of the distrust here is that google wants to be everything: to host
their content and publisher content and user content; to broker ads and
recommend links; to run their software on your computer and phone, to store
your data on their servers. They serve too many masters.

1: [https://i.imgur.com/HalErpIr.png](https://i.imgur.com/HalErpIr.png)

~~~
tommek4077
As an advertiser, you can write whatever you want into the url displayed
there. This does not need to match the real target.

~~~
ridiculous_fish
But the real target is google.com.

I just made
[https://sites.google.com/view/whalefacts](https://sites.google.com/view/whalefacts),
took me literally ten seconds, confirmed it was accessible from multiple IPs
and multiple browsers.

Google wants to be a content host and an ad broker and a search engine. Each
of these is reasonable in isolation. Yet you can search on google, and Google
will serve you an ad linking to a google.com site, and that site scams you out
of money. This isn't theoretical, I know because my family was hit.

Screenshot if it gets taken down:
[https://i.imgur.com/T6hVHr5.png](https://i.imgur.com/T6hVHr5.png)

~~~
kzrdude
Super boring answer, and this is not an admonition to you, but in general;
shouldn't this lead to lawsuits? It needs to be tried in court.

------
jacob019
New York Times and all the other publishers don't have to participate in this
crap. It's shameful that they cede authority over their content so easily in
exchange for a vuage promise of more visibility. There are so many better
ways.

~~~
untog
It’s not a vague promise, it’s an extremely explicit one. Search results for
news contain a “top carousel”, a horizontally scrolling box that shows cards
for different articles. On most phones it takes up most of the screen. If you
want to be in the carousel (i.e. if you want your site to be visible near the
top of search results) you must use AMP. No ifs and buts about it.

If NYTimes and _every other news organisation_ refused to participate then
yes, Google would be in trouble. But they can rely on good old divide and
conquer: these news organisations all compete with each other. All it would
take is for one to starting producing AMP content again and they’d vacuum up
all the search traffic, and all the other sites would follow them immediately.

------
nwsm
This has been all over HN since amp was released, and this is a two paragraph
article with no new info or opinion.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?q=google+amp](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=google+amp)

~~~
mindfulhack
I suppose 328 votes so far show the usefulness of repeat discussions. This
article is a catalyst to keep this one going. The votes prove that it's an
important enough issue to continue talking about.

~~~
Kiro
Not really. HN just loves to hate on AMP.

~~~
mikro2nd
Perhaps there are some good reasons for that.

------
princevegeta89
This is the question I always had and confused myself over.

In addition to this, I previously stumbled upon a few situations where I
visited an AMP site to read an article and I noted down the site name in my
mind. A few days later I tried to visit that site and when I put the site name
in the address bar in hopes of getting helped by autocomplete, guess what?! It
was nowhere to be found.

------
markosaric
Time to share this post one more time:

How to fight back against Google AMP [https://markosaric.com/google-
amp/](https://markosaric.com/google-amp/)

And the original thread
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21712733](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21712733)

------
bobbydroptables
AMP seems like a solution in search of a problem. Are people really having
trouble with loading speed in 2020? I travel to remote areas in third world
countries regularly for work and still don't really have problems loading
pages with mobile data.

Even if it didn't have all of the problems associated with it I just don't get
the point. I don't need Google to repackage a website with less useability.
It's frequently not even faster.

~~~
smabie
I lived in Africa and the only internet I had was cellular and by the gb. Amp
is a massive improvement over the extremely large web pages we now have to
endure.

It's also much faster to render, which makes a huge difference on the crappy
Android phones that are everywhere. Hell, I'm using a $200 Android phone right
now because my iPhone broke and browsing the web is painful on it. And with
the terrible hauwei $40 phones that have taken over Africa, most of the web is
unusable.

I don't like Google's control of Amp, but it exists because of the original
sin of html and js. Everything about html is terrible: bloated, pointlessly
verbose, etc.

I have a dream that we all just start using Gopher and dump the www, but it's
never going to happen. Maybe even browser vendors could get to together and
design a super light weight markup based on S-exps or something, but that's
probably not going to happen either. Amp is the best we got and it solves a
real problem. And it solves the problem well.

~~~
lultimouomo
But does AMP makes internet usable on those $40 phones? I have a recent mid-
range $200 phone and pretty much the only website the regularly hogs my
browser is Google News, which coincidentally is also the only one that uses
AMP. It's anecdote, but in my experience AMP (or whatever else Google News
does) degrades performance to an amazing extent.

~~~
izacus
Google News is far from being the only one using AMP and there's a massive
difference in loading times and rendering speed for most news sites between
AMP and non-AMP versions even on my 1GBit internet connection.

~~~
lultimouomo
FWIW my impression is not that Google News is bandwidth heavy, but that it is
JavaScript heavy. It works fine on the computer but it's hard to use on the
phone, even on the same connection.

------
noisy_boy
Google has already effectively become the address bar - people go to
google.com to go to any other website. Now they are just solidifying it so
that you don't even remember the url of a website after a while.

------
causality0
I despise AMP for the entirely selfish and pedestrian reason that it hijacks
my phone's browser bar and won't let me access tab management until I scroll
all the way back up to the top of the page.

------
SpeakForMyself
Totally disagree with this drama whoever is putting on for the sake of being
in the group of 'anti-google so I am looked as if I am so smart and so know it
all and google is trying to control everyone and nobody sees it except me now
I am writing a post to tell the world how different I am'

As a user, before learning computer knowledge, I am so thankful and amazed by
those AMP pages, because they are really fast! And I barely look at this URL
thing to care for security which is huge deal to those conspiracy queens,
because as non-tech user I don't know a heck about URL, all I care is how fast
a page is presented to me.

So, no, the problem is only you, yes, you can just use a dramatic title just
because you are so bored with your life to cause a scene, you are only
embracing yourself and bring some noise to this already chaotic world, please,
go find yourself something to do instead of trying so hard to be internet
famous. Thank you.

------
Kiro
> Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) are lightweight pages designed to load
> quickly on mobile devices. AMP-compliant pages use a subset of HTML with a
> few extensions. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), is a very accessible
> framework for creating fast-loading mobile web pages.

That itself sounds awesome and something we should promote. The other part of
AMP is of course that it's served through Google's servers. While their global
edge caches probably bring the speed up I think that's less important.

I other words: AMP as a framework to force users to build light-weight pages
without bloat is a good thing. Google's control is a bad thing.

I think many of the comments here make it a borderline topic where there's
either all or nothing. I want to see a more nuanced discussion on what the
possible alternatives and solutions are instead of just "Google bad, AMP bad".

------
satyrnein
Does it actually matter where you are, or is that just an implementation
detail?

One interpretation is that Google is changing the URL bar from "where" to
"who", which may be the more relevant information for most users. Signed
exchanges are an interesting way to achieve that.

------
rammy1234
Internet before shows the real URL. Plain and simple.

------
didip
I remembered long time ago when Digg tried to do this and the internet
revolted.

I guess times have changed.

------
grey_earthling
If The New York Times is unhappy with this use of their branding, it seems to
me that they could easily claim trademark infringement.

They could argue that Google is using The New York Times's branding and domain
name to make it look like this content is controlled and provided by The New
York Times, when in fact it isn't, and that an average person (“idiot in a
hurry”) could be deceived.

If The New York Times willingly gives Google permission (or The New York Times
willingly abets Google's monopoly position), then I guess Google can do
whatever they like.

------
vincentmarle
AMP is a lot like how I was browsing the web on my phone before the iPhone
came out. Opera Mini’s servers would proxy _every single page_ I visited and
fetch and pre-compile it before sending it compressed to my phone. It was way
more performant than trying to render the page natively on my crappy phone.
(That’s why the iPhone was so unique, it was the first phone that could
natively render websites really well). Sure, there were a lot less security
and privacy concerns back then, but I think the majority of users simply don’t
care as long as it works.

------
anonu
Remember when Google's mantra was "Don't be evil" ???

~~~
lalos
"Don't be evil", using primary colors in the logo to bring that kindergarten
familiarity, fun doodles, a dumb funny movie and quirky April Fools projects
were a great marketing strategy to distract your average person in lowering
their guard and feel safe to give all the data to an advertisement company. I
wonder if they currently teach this case in marketing/PR classes.

~~~
smabie
I mean, I don't think that was the intention. I'm sure Page and Brin really
wanted to be different when they started. But as a company grows, the vision
of the founders is excised and replaced with the same shit found in all large
corporations.

To be clear, I don't think Google or any other large company is evil. It's
just the way things turn on, how the incentives are structured.

~~~
S_A_P
I think that’s a great way to put it. Each decision to grow the business is
not necessarily bad or evil. As google has grown and acquired market share
they leveraged that to spur more growth and market share. They act in their
own best interest. It’s not necessarily evil, but selfish motives and evil
sometimes look a lot alike.

------
nokya
I have my own proxy filtering all my desktop and mobile traffic, anything
'AMP' is filtered spot on. Sometimes nothing shows up, sometimes the original
server responds after a few seconds. I'd rather not see the page at all than
play this game.

~~~
hjek
Try the _Redirect AMP to HTML_ [0] browser add-on to get out of the game
without getting blank pages. There's also _Privacy Redirect_ [1] for getting
out of the Youtube / Twitter / Instagram / Google Maps game.

[0]: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
GB/firefox/addon/amp2html](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
GB/firefox/addon/amp2html)

[1]: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/privacy-
redir...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/privacy-redirect/)

------
paxys
Regardless of your feelings on AMP, the premise of this article is wrong.
Security standards and expectations are still exactly the same in this model.
You see "google.com" in the address bar and trust that Google is serving you
the right content.

------
bamboozled
What happened to The Internet? Honestly.

Google should can do this stuff if they like...on their own network in their
own ecosystem.

Insane that they got rich from hyperlinks and now want to fiddle with the so
others can't.

------
aronpye
AMP is the main reason I switched to DuckDuckGo from Google. Webpage rendering
often used to break on iOS, in particular scrolling where the page would just
go blank.

~~~
collinmanderson
Yeah AMP is one of many reasons I switched to DuckDuckGo. “Why am I giving
Google this much power? Why am I contributing to them being a monopoly?” were
the general reasons.

Hearing people mention low quality search results was what kept me off, but
I’ve actually only needed to do a google search about once a week, far less
than I was expecting.

------
anonymousDan
Google amp links are so annoying too when you want to send a link to other
people of something you've searched for. One of the main reasoms Inuse
duckduckgo.

------
lazyjones
What will all those submissive publishers do once Google decides to monetize
AMP by injecting their own ads with 0 revenue for the publisher?

------
geertj
I noticed this two days ago and it was the final straw that made me switch to
DuckDuckGo on all my devices.

------
Angostura
This is absolutely the reason that Google is no longer my default search
engine on mobile.

------
graiz
AMP is the consequence of HTML and CSS being awful at performance. I'm not
sure why the underlying problem hasn't been addressed. Rending text and images
on a page shouldn't require a secondary cache and an amp rendering framework
on top of ton of css and layers of javascript. It's text and images.

------
buboard
I wonder how many phishing sites are masquerading as google _from_ google

------
anonymousDan
Is anyone aware of any Firefox/brave plugins that strip Google amp links?

------
vipulved
Grabby and wrong, and most of the value created is for Google.

------
young_unixer
I don't get the point of article.

I know Google wants browsers to lie to the user about the website they're
visiting. But the article screenshot is a case where that's _not_ happening,
it's displaying the real URL.

------
thierryzoller
You are at home in front of you screen. Thank me later.

------
cannedslime
The only one who wins when media outlets integrate AMP, is google. Stop the
madness, for the love of an open internet. You gain nothing, you are just
giving google control over content as the new norm.

------
pvg
_Quis hic locus, quae regio, quae mundi plaga?_

------
kebman
Haven't news sites pushed law suits over this?

------
metalliqaz
I don't like AMP and I wish we just fixed the problems it is designed to
handle at the root cause.

~~~
jacquesm
Get rid of Google?

------
stuff4ben
it's 2020 and ya'll are still using Google?!?! DDG all the way!

------
user764743
You're on a website stealing content from NYT.

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rdiddly
A: You are on Google. There's no confusion.

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surajs
Google sucks, i'm going golfing.

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gorgoiler
With the utmost respect to you and the other commenters here, when I see
positivity about the abstract, _hypothetical_ technical merits of something
with a long history of, in practice, being part of an extremely controversial
power play it reminds me a lot of the comments I see promoting a widely
installed piece of process management software — one which a lot of people
don’t really want, whose subtle changes to layers of abstraction introduce new
and unexpected bugs that can only be fixed by further coupling, and which can
also be reasonably described as a single entity politically maneuvering itself
to bring order to the chaos at the expense of living in, for want of a better
term, a dictatorship.

 _Well at least under Google AMP, the pages loaded on time._

~~~
cosmodisk
You might want to work on reducing the length of your sentences- it's very
hard to get the meaning behind them.

~~~
Noumenon72
To me all the difficulty is caused by the obscuration. Once you get to the
point where he refuses to say which software he's talking about, your
attention scatters to all the different things he might be referring to. If I
talk about Oracle's subtle changes to layers of abstraction, you can read the
sentence and decide whether that describes Oracle well or not. If I talk about
"a widely installed piece of process management software" doing that,
everything else I say is just a riddle trying to figure out which one.

~~~
afarrell
I think thats part of the point. It makes his statement conversationally non-
falsifiable because if I say something about (taking a guess here) systemd,
that will say more about my own biases than what I am responding to.

~~~
rblatz
My best guess was Jira, not everything made sense but it was the only thing I
could think of.

~~~
wizzard
Process management, not project management.

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pnako
You're on Google, the 21st century version of AOL

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chvid
I think the author has got it all wrong.

You are supposed to trust Google.

And when your browser says 'Google' \- you know it is all good.

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killjoywashere
If you think this is creepy, wait until you see Menlo Security. That's
security for everyone _except_ the user.

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Kiro
AMP is disliked by privileged people who have never experienced how truly
awful browsing the web with a bad internet connection can be.

~~~
saagarjha
Perhaps they instead see the “solution” to be problematic.

~~~
Kiro
Yes, but not acknowledging the problem and that AMP is a solution, even if
it's the wrong solution, defeats any meaningful discussions. We need something
like AMP but outside of Google's control.

My point is that it's so easy to just see the drawbacks and none of the
benefits when you're sitting on a good connection. All threads on HN becomes
completely one-sided where everyone is just backslapping each other's
complaints.

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7leafer
"Does google rig the system to squash its rivals and hurt us?"

Well, this is one kind of modern skepticism I particularly like: Does gravity
kill if one jumps off a cliff? Is a sphere round? Is it really bad if we give
up our freedom? Who are we to think for ourselves?

When questions like this are asked, the damage is already done. And it seems
like it's already beyond repair.

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jakeogh
Users executing their code are the product. Giving those people the
independence of knowing who they are talking to is contrary to their business
model.

Image AMP? No URL for You!
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23322730](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23322730)

Tangental:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20930270](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20930270)

