
Google AMP Is a Threat to the Open Web - zodiakzz
https://www.socpub.com/articles/chris-graham-why-google-amp-threat-open-web-15847
======
mrtksn
I think it's very important to address the reason why AMP is possible in the
first place: Websites are so extremely slow these days.

From users perspective, when I see the lightning icon on my search results I
feel happy because it means that the page will show me it's contents as soon
as I click it.

It means that the website is not going to show me white page for 15 seconds
then start jumping around, changing shape and position for another 30 seconds
until everything is downloaded.

I hear all the ethical/economical/strategic concerns but the tech community
resembles the taxi industry a bit, that is, claiming that a tech that improves
users experience significantly is bad for the user and must be stopped
politically instead of addressing the UX issue that allows this tech to exist
in first place.

~~~
MaxBarraclough
The tragedy of it is that web browsers have never been faster - it's just that
websites insist on bloating, and bloating, and bloating. It's not unusual for
modern websites to have literally _megabytes_ of pointless JavaScript.
(Reminder: Super Mario 64 weighs in at 8MB. The whole game.)

AMP strikes me as a clever technical solution to a problem that doesn't need a
technical solution. It just needs restraint and better web development with
existing standard technologies, and ideally a strong taboo on bloated web-
sites.

See also two other technologies, the existences of which damn the web: Opera
Mini (cloud rendering! and it's _useful!_ ), which can only exist for as long
as the web is laughably inefficient, and Reader Mode, which improves modern
web-design by removing it entirely.

~~~
mrtksn
What people do when a website that goes popular on HN or Reddit is too slow or
can't respond at all? Someone on the comments links to Google Cache and more
often than not this js-less basic HTML snapshot is good enough.

AMP is just a way to do this properly and automatically. The Webdev community
chooses to ignore the speed of the content delivery and Google seized the
opportunity.

What can a modern webpage do for the user that 2008 webpage can't? For most of
the web, the answer is nothing, all the improvements are about better tooling
for the management(measure and monetize) of the webpage.

~~~
tankenmate
"AMP is just a way to do this properly and automatically." I don't
automatically dispute the second part of that statement, but the "properly"
bit requires more than a handwave to prove its point.

~~~
mrtksn
Properly means properly for the user, that is, without the aesthetically
breaking the page or losing content(as it happens with google cache
sometimes).

Nobody cares about the business that runs the website, businesses don't have
god given rights to get users and make money. If some other business serves
the users better(i.e. Google with AMP) they can get all the users. Who felt
sorry for MySpace when getting killed by Facebook or who advocated the right
of having users for Digg when everyone moved to Reddit?

Another thing is being a monopoly and exploiting that position, which is
always a concern with giants like Google but at this moment with AMP doesn't
seem to be the case.

~~~
tankenmate
If nobody cares about the businesses at the other end then one day you'll wake
up to find that the only business left on the other side is Google, and then
where will you turn?

    
    
      Roper: So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law!
      More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through
      the law to get after the Devil?
      Roper: I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
      More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil
      turned round on you — where would you hide, Roper, the
      laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with
      laws from coast to coast — man's laws, not God's — and
      if you cut them down — and you're just the man to do
      it — d'you really think you could stand upright in the
      winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil
      benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.[0]
    

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUqytjlHNIM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUqytjlHNIM)

~~~
mrtksn
How this changes the fact that nobody cares?

Uber is probably also a threat to the public(apparently the people who run
Uber are not very nice, remember all the scandals?) but people are so fed up
with the taxi industry that they welcoming Uber to "slaughter" their local
cabbies.

It's just business and that's why we don't live in a libertarian world and we
have government bodies that regulate businesses.

------
lukestevens
I attempted to discuss related issues regarding AMP Email with @cramforce, the
AMP tech lead, here:
[https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13457#issuecomm...](https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13457#issuecomment-367189418)

The discussion, if nothing else, sheds some degree of light on how the AMP
tech lead sees the situation.

------
whyagaindavid
Genuine question: Why do people view AMP as a threat, whereas many Apple's
formats/compatibility are non-standard? Is it because many accept privacy over
openness? Example: Apple news or iTunes or Messages

~~~
jayflux
My guess is that they are separate services which have always been that way
and people can choose not to use them from the beginning. Amp is different in
that it sits in front of a lot of websites which used to work directly, it’s
apples and oranges.

iTunes didn’t _take over_ any existing service or stop you from doing
something you could before on the web

~~~
tyler_larson
So then it's akamai or limelight, then. Still not a threat.

Open standard, opt-in free cdn, independent compatible alternatives; this does
not sound like a hostile takeover of your freedom.

~~~
vertex-four
The thing is... if you don’t use Google’s libraries and opt in to Google’s
broken UI on mobile (you no longer actually go to the website, you’re kept on
a weird container that contains the website), you get a drop in Google’s
search results. There are no independent compatible alternatives which do not
get that drop.

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sureaboutthis
>The web community has stated over and over again that we’re not comfortable
with Google incentivizing the use of AMP with search engine carrots. In
response, Google has provided yet another search engine carrot for AMP. This
wouldn’t bother me if AMP was open about what it is: a tool for folks to
optimize their search engine placement. But of course, that’s not the claim.
The claim is that AMP is “for the open web.”

[https://timkadlec.com/remembers/2018-02-14-the-two-faces-
of-...](https://timkadlec.com/remembers/2018-02-14-the-two-faces-of-amp/)

More:
[https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2018/02/linkbait_37...](https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2018/02/linkbait_37.html)

------
ocdtrekkie
I think a large portion of the tech industry understands Google AMP is an
undeniable threat to the open web. The question is: Is there anything that can
be done to stop it?

~~~
sseth
There are many threats to the open web. For example, governments building
firewalls. Lot of content locked up in walled gardens. The death of net
neutrality.

Definitely one of the threats to the open web would be the web platform
falling behind "native" platforms such as mobile platforms. 10 years ago it
seemed that native apps are dead, the web is going to win. And then the rise
of smartphones has brought us back to a world where we are forever installing
native applications. From what i can see, attempts to make the web faster
(SPDY, AMP), safer (Certificate Transparency), more open (AV1) are all
initiatives i can get behind. The question is : What are other companies doing
to ensure the web retains its place as the premier open content / application
development platform.

~~~
r3bl
Aren't all of the companies that we are usually associating with doing bad
things for the web (Microsoft, Google, Apple) now also pushing PWAs on their
platforms? Google seemed far ahead of the push, Microsoft and Apple are
currently on the run to bring them to Edge and Safari, and Mozilla introduced
them to mobile Firefox less than a month ago.

And isn't there more of an incentive towards structuring the web coming from
these big players as well? Google and Microsoft (and Yandex) created
Schema.org, and are all giving them a priority in this switch from search
results to instant answers.

I guess my point is to say that the companies that are locking the web are
somewhat playing on both fields and giving webmasters products that are truly
improving the web as well. It's far from being a one-sided battle.

~~~
sseth
Of the IT giants, Google has the most to lose from a closed web. The rise of
mobile apps and walled gardens is a direct threat to their search business
model. So the argument that Google would threaten the open web seems strange,
on purely selfish grounds.

AMP seems to be an attempt to keep the web relevant. In countries like India
(where i live), most new users access the web via the mobile, and the
experience can be far worse than in the west, and absent of initiatives such
as AMP you will see a fall off in web usage in general. I am not sure how that
helps the open web.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
How so? Google controls over 85% of the devices those mobile apps run on, and
they sell ads through those apps as well.

------
tamrix
Welcome to internet hub 85.* Lighting access to the world's information. __

* additional charges occur when accessing information outside from the Internet hub.

 __Internet hub only allows storing of information which the government
approves. Storing unauthorised information on the internet hub will result in
your biometric account being banned for life. Access to the rest of the
internet is not affected.

------
tanilama
The title and article feels like hyperbole:

As user, I love AMP. It is much faster and lighter. God knows what javascript
is running behind those websites that drives my CPU usage to 100%.

~~~
dmitriid
As a user, I hate AMP: it breaks links, it breaks browser behaviour on mobile

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LocutusOfBorges
This is particularly noticable on iOS- AMP pages break iOS' standard page
scrolling ballistics, for some reason. It makes them feel non-native in a
particularly egregious way.

~~~
wor3q
Wasn't this a safari bug?

~~~
dmitriid
In a sense:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14386292](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14386292)

However, it was AMP team's conscious decision to implement handling of AMP the
way they did: divs with overflow, hiding links etc.

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thinkMOAR
I miss the 'ads' part of AMP in the article? One of the main goals is to serve
ads better/faster.

"The AMP Project is an open-source initiative aiming to make the web better
for all. The project enables the creation of websites and ads that are
consistently fast, beautiful and high-performing across devices and
distribution platforms."

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SnowingXIV
I spent yesterday creating an AMP portion of a website and it was a pain, I
got it to a decent state but when I ran performance tests it wasn't that much
better but the usability seemed to suffer. I'm not sure if it's worth it. The
website's sole business purpose is to succeed in SEO so that's why I thought
it might be worth doing (if it sends a signal to google). Since non-amp and
amp are already getting high marks and loads very fast I rather not include
amp if doesn't actually increase SERPs. If someone knows the facts here I'd
love to know because I scrapped it and would prefer not to look back.

------
Kiro
How can I see that someone visited my site if it's served by Google's cache?

~~~
dx034
If you use AMP, you can use amp-pixel for tracking. If you have content that
automatically reloads (e.g. amp-live-list), this will also show up in your
server logs.

I don't find user behaviour on amp harder to track than for non-amp pages. At
least if you keep tracking to a reasonable level.

