
Google wants websites to adopt AMP as the default for building webpages - seductivebarry
https://www.polemicdigital.com/google-amp-go-to-hell/
======
xg15
I don't like AMP at all and fully agree with all the lock-in concerns - but I
didn't find this post particularly convincing.

This reads in places like a developer or publisher who has grown accustomated
to stuffing his pages with gobs and gobs of javascript and questionable UI
patterns and is now outraged at the prospect that someone wants to take that
privilege away from him. I can't agree with that.

Examples:

> _The underlying message is clear: Google wants full equivalency between AMP
> and canonical URL. Every element that is present on a website’s regular
> version should also be present on its AMP version: every navigation item,
> every social media sharing button, every comment box, every image gallery._

So Google's suggestion is that, _if you 've already chosen to offer an AMP
page_, that page shouldn't have intentionally worse usability than the
original?

> _For years Google has been nudging webmasters to create better websites –
> ‘better’ meaning ‘easier for Google to understand’. Technologies like XML
> sitemaps and schema.org structured data are strongly supported by Google
> because they make the search engine’s life easier.

Other initiatives like disavow files and rel=nofollow help Google keep its
link graph clean and free from egregious spam. All the articles published on
Google’s developer website are intended to ensure the chaotic, messy web
becomes more like a clean, easy-to-understand web. In other words, a Google-
shaped web. This is a battle Google has been fighting for decades._

Sitemaps and structured data were the _non-proprietary_ attempts to structure
the web. Those could have made the web more accessible for everyone, not just
Google. They are something fundamentally different than AMP.

Yet, he condemns them too? Why?

He seems to argue that the chaos and messiness of the web infrastructure is
itself a quality that should be defended. Why would that be the case?

~~~
coldtea
> _This reads in places like a developer or publisher who has grown
> accustomated to stuffing his pages with gobs and gobs of javascript and
> questionable UI patterns and is now outraged at the prospect that someone
> wants to take that privilege away from him. I can 't agree with that._

Well, it's not your job to agree with that or not though. He should be free to
do as he pleases (so, the freedom to spew gobs of JS etc. should be
unarguable) and you should be free to not visit his page.

~~~
ben_w
Should they be free to spew gobs of JS?

The average person can’t tell in advance — or, often, after the event — that
this will happen, and when it does happen it is bad for them.

Aside from the security issues, the current status quo shortens battery life,
wastes bandwidth (which is still precious and limited on mobile, even if not
on landlines), and is generally done for the benefit of everyone except the
user.

~~~
coldtea
> _Should they be free to spew gobs of JS? The average person can’t tell in
> advance — or, often, after the event — that this will happen, and when it
> does happen it is bad for them._

If they can tell in advance, they can tell it after, and punish the page by
not visiting it.

If they can't tell it after the event, then it shouldn't matter.

~~~
xg15
> _If they can 't tell it after the event, then it shouldn't matter._

Ah yes, the famous strategy for solving all problems: Hiding them, because if
no one notices them anymore, they are not problems anymore.

~~~
coldtea
Isn't that the definition of empiricism and/or utilitarianism?

If something doesn't impact someone in a way that they can ever tell, it is
not a problem to them.

------
walterbell
Google is also trying to get rid of URLs in Chrome, which dovetails with AMP
certificate-signed content, [https://www.engadget.com/2018/09/05/google-
change-interact-u...](https://www.engadget.com/2018/09/05/google-change-
interact-urls-website-security/)

 _> So we want to move toward a place where web identity is understandable by
everyone—they know who they're talking to when they're using a website and
they can reason about whether they can trust them. But this will mean big
changes in how and when Chrome displays URLs._

There's an IETF proposal for certificate-signed web content (Web Packages)
which can be rendered offline. The browser address bar will no longer show the
URL of the web server (e.g. Google AMP), it will show the authenticated origin
of the Web Package.

2017 IETF proposal by Google: [https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-yasskin-
webpackage-use-cas...](https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-yasskin-webpackage-
use-cases-00)

Video of a Chrome demo at 2018 AMP event, which looks like the latest Chrome
proposal for hiding URLs in favor of “web identity”:
[https://youtube.com/watch?&t=9m03s&v=pr5cIRruBsc](https://youtube.com/watch?&t=9m03s&v=pr5cIRruBsc)

There may be overlap in goals with W3C Web Publications, which is working to
converge EPUB and Web:
[https://w3c.github.io/wpub/](https://w3c.github.io/wpub/)

What happens if your “web identity” certificate expires or is
revoked/blacklisted? Does your web identity certificate require a separate
yearly fee from the domain name?

Edit: Comments from Chrome dev team manager,
[https://twitter.com/__apf__/status/1037057121961967616](https://twitter.com/__apf__/status/1037057121961967616)
&
[https://twitter.com/__apf__/status/1037181065423515648](https://twitter.com/__apf__/status/1037181065423515648)

 _> URLs aren't usable, but people are forced to rely on them for so much --
browsing, security, sharing. Expect to see changes to how Chrome displays
identity in the coming year._

~~~
crunchlibrarian
This "hide the url from the user" is exactly what America Online did back in
the day to try and keep everyone from leaving their garden. I remember being
offended by it and trying to explain to people what that meant and that they
should cancel their AOL accounts over it, with little success.

How did Google get this bad? Why are we letting the internet devolve back to
the early 90s?

~~~
refulgentis
To be honest I think that's jumping to conclusions based on an article that's
absolutely leaping to conclusions. It's highly unlikely Google's web crawling
team conspired with AMP to force the web to convert to AMP

~~~
walterbell
Are you replying to the correct comment? Was that claim made in this thread?

~~~
IAmGraydon
That claim was the basis of the entire article. Did you read it?

------
brosirmandude
Yeah that's gonna be a no from me dog...

As a marketer I've been fortunate enough to avoid most of the AMP fallout
because of the specific makeup of my clientele. However, my colleagues who
have to deal with AMP want Google to kill it forever and never bring it back.

~~~
s17n
The fact that marketers hate it can only be taken as evidence that it's a good
thing.

~~~
ignostic
I know this is a bit cheeky, but HN sometimes has this comically simplistic
view of other professions. It's as bad as the older C_Os who refer to all of
dev and IT as "computer people." As someone who is both a developer and a
marketer I can tell you both fields have depth and value, and neither is easy
to do well.

Success often hinges on making something people want. Marketing done well is
hugely helpful in determining both what people want and whether they perceive
a product as a solution to their problems, and it can help guide product
development with marketing analytics and other user data. I don't think I'd
ever have been successful without a marketing background.

To take it back to the original point, I will never move to AMP. I spend a lot
of time speeding up my pages through simplification, caching, and any other
trick that makes sense (deferment, lazy loading, minification, combining,
etc.) But there are a lot of reasons to not want your link to start with
amp.google.com when someone shares my page.

* Any links to that URL rely on the good graces of the search engines to "count" for rankings and continue sending traffic. This is especially worrying if I decide to change standards. Will my rankings tank? Will the crawlers get totally confused and think I have a bunch of 404s? Both have been reported. These are not risks I'm willing to take with my sites that took so much work to build and promote.

* When someone shares my page I want my URL to be clear - not some google.com URL. That's both confusing for the user and bad for building a brand. Even if it was a cname to my own subdomain I'd feel better, e.g. amp.mysite.com

* Aside from the reason above, the lock-in is philosophically problematic. I intentionally use cross-platform apps on my phone because I don't want to be locked into an ecosystem. I don't foresee switching to Apple, but I didn't foresee switching to Android either. The point is that I could. This freedom is important to me.

* I don't trust that Google is committed to me and my content. Just look at the YouTubers getting screwed over by Google's lazy copyright policy. What makes you think they're going to suddenly staff up and/or care more on web content?

Anyway, as a writer, marketer, business owner, and web developer: fuck AMP.

~~~
nojvek
> I don't trust that Google is committed to me and my content.

This * million. The only thing I can reliably trust google is that when I type
a search query, results will be meaningful.

Regarding them keeping my data secure, not selling out to NSA, dropping
support for things on a whim, kicking users out of their platform, I can’t
really trust them.

Google or anyone else.

It’s just not their core business. They don’t really make much money from AMP.
It feels like some VP’s pet project to get a big fat stock bonus.

If you run a serious business. Stay the hell away from AMP.

~~~
briandear
I honestly don’t care about the NSA; nothing I am doing would even be remotely
interesting to them. I am more concerned about my privacy being exploited by
advertisers, banks, credit bureaus, political campaigns, and over-zealous
local governments.

~~~
alrs
Do intelligence agencies exist to "keep us safe", or to advance the state's
economic interests?

~~~
Lio
I guess one could think of that as a false dichotomy. I’m not sure you can
necessarily cleanly separate these two things.

------
mindfulhack
I understand that Google may want more and more control over the web, but we
need a free and open Internet, for both business innovation and non-economic
societal growth. It's a good thing we have other data giants like Facebook and
Amazon to say no to Google when moments arise like this.

And I predict that future technologies will democratize the ability to
3D-print hardware to be used with open-source networking and web software to
connect to each other in ways that don't depend on single web companies like
Google in order for it to be cheap and nice to use.

Think about this: no consumers care whether Google succeeds or not - people
just want the web services that they want. Google could easily fade away and
be supplanted by another entity in ten years' time if something sufficiently
innovative and disruptive arrives on the scene.

~~~
bduerst
I'm not sure I completely agree - I think the internet is so laissez faire
that it attracts centralized powers to fill the vacuum it creates. The future
of the internet and what it looks like is probably going to depend heavily on
the net neutrality legislation that is passed on the next decade.

------
petepete
The idea of moving en masse to a technology that's controlled by a single
company just doesn't sit right.

~~~
bduerst
Can't companies host and control their own version of AMP?

~~~
st26
They can, but don't get credit for it in Google's page rank. Which to me makes
the whole complaint sound dishonest. They want to have their cake and eat it
too.

~~~
fooker
>don't get credit for it in Google's page rank

How do you know that? There are very few people in the world who can claim
that with evidence.

~~~
hegz
I haven't tested it but google shows a lighting bolt next to amp sites so
maybe the custom amp websites dont get the bolt.

~~~
ovi256
That should be easy to test, given that cloudflare hosts a top-level AMP
cache. Just check if a cloudflare-cached website gets the bolt.

------
ehnto
AMP has horrible UX for mobile, I hate when I click on an AMP link because I
am suddenly in some wierd web Twilight zone where the UX for my browser has
changed for the worse.

It has been a net negative for usability in my book.

~~~
anitil
I always end up scrolling back on the url to change 'amp' to 'm'. Manually
editing a URL on a mobile device, it just makes me sad.

~~~
binomialxenon
On desktop I use an extension that redirects any AMP page (I don't come across
them often, but people share links) to the canonical page. It would most
likely be possible to install it in Firefox mobile too.

I also have all amp-related addresses blocked in my host file, which is
probably less feasible on mobile.

------
millstone
AMP is in two parts: the HTML/JS spec, and the Google implementation and
cache.

Putting aside the Google bits, is there a case against building within the AMP
HTML and JS spec? Or is the case against all down to Google's ownership of the
project?

On my iPhone AMP is frustratingly buggy: rotation doesn't work properly, the
URL bar doesn't disappear on scroll, Reader mode works inconsistently, etc.
But these seem like issues with Google's cache and hosting, not the spec.

~~~
mattmanser
So, we spent ages getting to where everyone agreed on standards and they were
correctly implemented.

Google are now making new standards which don't conform to the agreed
standard, which restrict how you can build your site. If you don't do it,
they'll destroy your traffic.

AMP is text book Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. No ad network but the Google ad
network allowed.

We're sleep walking back into the same thing MS did 30 years ago, with Google
this time. They really have just lived long enough to become the villain.

~~~
EdwardDiego
> AMP is text book Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. No ad network but the Google
> ad network allowed.

Are you talking hypothetically? Because right now...

[https://www.ampproject.org/docs/ads/ads_vendors](https://www.ampproject.org/docs/ads/ads_vendors)

~~~
sverhagen
Somewhat ironically that link doesn't work on my mobile device...

------
mikhailt
Oh wow, these type of behaviors is why I’m starting to lean onto the idea of
splitting these monopolists into their own companies. I wasn’t sure why it
made any sense in the other article today from The Verge:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17918264](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17918264)

But now...

~~~
PinkMilkshake
I would much prefer a market based solution.

Searching news on Google is a bad experience. AMP has made it even worse.

There’s room in search.

~~~
tracker1
I still miss when Reader was still very popular.

------
babuskov
In my experience CloudFlare has too many false positives outside of US/EU
networks. I often cannot access websites that are behind CluodFlare. It would
be a really sad day if they became a gateway to 50% of web traffic.

~~~
vanderZwan
I agree with your point (based on my travels), but it would be nice if you
could elaborate on what the connection to AMP is. Same kind of market
dominance with potential abuse?

~~~
seriocomic
I'm assuming that comment is in reference to Cloudflare also being in the AMP
game, but acting as an AMP cache. In their words:

> _Until now, AMP-enabled links were only accessible through the likes of
> Google, Twitter, Bing News, and Facebook. Cloudflare’s Accelerated Mobile
> Links democratizes the power of AMP for free across all Cloudflare plans._

------
eudora
Look at this hilarious list of amp caches, showing what Google considers a
decentralised standard
[https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/caches.jso...](https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/caches.json)

~~~
xg15
Hey, it's more than one! /s

~~~
arihant
And quiet opposites as well. Baidu and Microsoft are major investors in
Cloudflare. But this list has to grow, by a lot.

~~~
nannal
so like, double or..

------
kemonocode
Ah yes, after web designers and developers took years upon years to bloat
webpages to the point they're almost unusable unless you're on a privileged
position: inaccessible to the blind, infuriatingly slow to those with slow
connections and laden with so much JavaScript and CSS and images, they're
impractical to those with a laptop or any battery-powered device... now they
band together against the evils of Google.

Now, don't get me wrong, Google is thinking primarily for their own benefit
here and this is one of those cases in which the end doesn't justify the
means, but is a simpler web that much of a bad thing?

~~~
apostacy
This morning when I was reading the thread about how Google wants to kill the
URL, nobody was seeing the more sinister implications at all.

I couldn't pay a parking ticket I got a few days ago because I needed to
download a half gigabye app to pay it, and my $250 phone from three years ago
wasn't new enough. And they developed the app first, and there was no fallback
to just HTML. My only choice was to go to the station and pay. What if I
couldn't afford to travel to pay my ticket in person and couldn't afford a
phone made in the last 18 months?

And yes, certificates will be politicized. If you displease them, they can
have every device in the world block your server.

Of course, soon, Firefox will just be a re-branded Chromium, because of course
Mozilla's brand is the only asset it has, as we all know that if Mozilla can't
make Firefox keep up with the impossible standards that Google sets for us,
then it is worthless. If Firefox can't implement the latest polyfills or DRM
garbage that Google decided on, then it should be thrown out and we should
just accept our new overlords.

Use any technology in a non-standard way, and it quickly becomes clear how bad
things are. The rot is even more visible in developing countries.

This is hegemony. Not exaggerating.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17911009](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17911009)

~~~
anfilt
Google has changed and people should not use their services.

------
da_murvel
I've never worked with AMP but reading about it I'm glad I haven't. For me
personally, I think the biggest issue with AMP is "The project enables the
creation of websites and ADS that are consistently fast ..." (taken from
[https://www.ampproject.org/](https://www.ampproject.org/), capitalization by
me). Yeah it's a google project, but really, do they honestly believe that
internet is for ads? I might be living in a bubble, but I've never heard
anyone speak fondly of ads. I worked for a media company for years which had
ads on their news sites and no one liked them. They were more of a necessary
evil needed to bring in some money, if we could have survived on subscriptions
alone we would never have had ads on our sites. Also, I think the amount of ad
blockers in use speak for itself.

------
45ghrthr54
The time has already passed to put this giant down. For a business that lost
it's capability of innovating at least 10 years ago, even having all of those
great brains as their workforce and plentiful money, they try too hard pushing
this kind of bullshit into the industry.

Stop trying to enforce unnatural and irrational changes just for gaining
protagonism on something you DON'T DESERVE and shouldn't even mess about.

It's already annoying having to load your analytics present in almost every
modern website, despise the fact that most of the world don't even know about
the existence of this, neither agreed with(cannot choose to block something
you don't even know about).

Are you thinking it's overreaction? wait for tomorrow. Keep underestimating
what they are doing.

------
crstauf
The real issue: marketers _gave_ Google the power, influence, and leverage
needed to push these sorts of things.

In a way I like AMP, as it restores the simplicity of the web, and I wish that
would've happened without Google making it necessary (to rank well).

Here's hoping marketers learn to market outside of Google and Facebook, _and_
the web is made simple again.

~~~
partiallypro
Marketers use Google and Facebook only because of laziness...Microsoft or
someone needs to make a tool that can manage bids etc across every ad network
for free and that alone would break Google's foothold in marketing. I've seen
PPC/etc teams drop Bing/Yahoo/Twitter/Snap etc entirely, not because the leads
weren't there, but because it becomes increasingly hard to manage large
budgets across multiple ad networks. And Google integrates so well with
Analytics, which just owns the space. It's a monopoly. I don't care if people
can "choose" a different search engine, marketers don't and can't without a
huge switching cost.

------
ccvannorman
As a user I hate AMP. I find myself on a website I want to share and go to
copy the link so I can share it, andd...surprise! It's NOT the canonical link,
but a Google Amp link. I wanted to share the post to a desktop. So now I have
to find my way out of this AMP hole just to share a website.

Personally I could care less about "speed improvements." If the site loads
slow I'll juat skip it. Amp existing to help that happen less doesn't really
affect me. I probably waste too much time surfing anyway; maybe I WANT to
filter slow websites on my own (by ending my search/session).

~~~
type0
> on a website I want to share and go to copy the link so I can share it,
> andd...surprise!

Eh easy now, they will fix that for soon /s

[https://www.businessinsider.com/google-chrome-url-
replacemen...](https://www.businessinsider.com/google-chrome-url-
replacement-2018-9)

------
Havoc
Reminds me of "embrace extend extinguish" except google skipped the "do as
you're told part"

------
red_admiral
I'm no fan of AMP, but:

The current choice for google when someone searches for a news story is
between linking them to a page that is (a) in an ecosystem under google's
control and (b) will load reasonably fast and get fairly straight to the
article content, or (a') is completely up to the publisher and (b') may
contain any number of redirects, external scripts, full-page ads, pop-ups and
overlays, autoplaying sound+video etc.

If we had a system that offers (a') + (b), it would blow everything else out
of the water. At the moment we just have to pick the least bad option. AMP is
obviously aligned to google's business interests, but if you A/B tested the
user experience of the AMP and non-AMP versions of many of the news sites out
there on mobile, I think you'd see a preference for AMP because the publisher
can do less of the stuff aligned with their own business interests.

EDIT: I realise that AMP can break many navigation features, but for the
"click a link - read a single article - leave again" use case it beats getting
interrupted by an "other articles you may enjoy, and by the way sign up to our
newsletter!" pop-up halfway through.

~~~
tyler33
AMP is the monopolistic dream of google, they want all the internet on their
servers, and thats not only bad, also it is ilegal

~~~
red_admiral
Google already has a copy of most of the internet on their servers - they're
quite open about this if at tech conferences (although they claim to respect
robots.txt).

I completely agree with you that their monopoly dream is bad - their motto
"don't be evil" is starting to sound as ironic as the word "democratic" in
some countries' names - but many of the advertising and data-sharing practices
on the "open" web are also bad (and sometimes illegal under the GDPR).

Choose your poison.

------
tempodox
Of course the Goog wants every web site on earth in their pocket. Now that
they own more than half of the Internet, they're in a perfect position for
<del>coercion</del> persuasion.

------
jancsika
Someone tell me about amp-iframe.

Do those restrictions[1] result in a browsing experience with

1\. significantly less resource usage/battery drain?

2\. less distraction?

3\. less of my user data flying off to who knows where?

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

------
pawurb
My 2 cents on AMP [https://pawelurbanek.com/amp-seo-rating-
performance](https://pawelurbanek.com/amp-seo-rating-performance)

Long story short: you can achieve similar performance and UX without resorting
to adopting a proprietary standard.

~~~
romanovcode
It's not about performance, it's about getting more points in google pagerank.

~~~
pawurb
SEO rating, user experience and website performance are closely related.

~~~
Cthulhu_
True, but Google's going more aggressive and putting sites that use their AMP
standards higher than those that don't - or in other words, they penalize good
/ fast websites to push AMP websites higher.

------
scoom
I can't wait for AMP to die. Too many broken sites and translating urls away
from google's attempt at taking over their hosting.

------
testcross
"Google wants to kill the web" should be the title of this article.

------
dagenix
> The end result is an enormously diverse and anarchic free-for-all where
> almost no two websites use the same code. It’s extremely rare to find
> websites that look good, have great functionality, and are fully W3C
> compliant.

> All the articles published on Google’s developer website are intended to
> ensure the chaotic, messy web becomes more like a clean, easy-to-understand
> web.

> AMP pages are fast to load (so fast to crawl), easy to understand (thanks to
> mandatory structured data), and devoid of any unwanted clutter or mess (as
> that breaks the standard).

> An AMPified web makes Google’s life so much easier. They would no longer
> struggle to crawl and index websites, they would require significantly less
> effort to extract meaningful content from webpages, and would enable them to
> rank the best possible pages in any given search result.

> The Google AMP Cache will serve AMP pages instead of a website’s own hosting
> environment, and also allow Google to perform their own optimisations to
> further enhance user experience.

> No more rogue ad networks, no more malicious ads, all monetisation approved
> and regulated by Google.

There are plenty of things to complain about with AMP. But, it also does
address some very real problems. These are some admittedly cherry picked
quotes - but, the article seems to make that point as well, even if it
disagrees with Google's approach. What I'd love to hear about is a different
approach to address these issues - and not something handwavy about how it
could be done in a weekend. Actual code.

------
tananaev
I believe that Google has good intentions behind pushing AMP. They want
websites to load faster. Everyone wants that. I especially hate those bloated
news websites. But AMP is a wrong solution for the problem. If Google wants to
make web pages faster, it can more heavily penalise slow and heavy pages in
search.

I used to host my website using WordPress with a lot of plugins. It was
incredibly slow and unreliable. Eventually I decided to replace it with my own
custom solution developed from scratch. We had blog, forum and payments on the
website. It took just a couple of months of evenings and weekend work to
complete the project. I'm very happy with the result [1]. It works 10x to 100x
faster and it's much more flexible. My point is that people shouldn't be
afraid of replacing their existing bloated system with something new and
better. I was afraid that it would be impossible to replicate WordPress and
plugins functionality that I needed, or it would take too much time and
effort, but I was wrong. I'm glad I made the move.

[1] [https://www.traccar.org/](https://www.traccar.org/)

~~~
dagenix
> It took just a couple of months of evenings and weekend work to complete the
> project.

That's kinda a lot of work. I'm not sure if you are saying that everyone
should do the same - that doesn't sound realistic.

The site does load fast and look great, though!

~~~
tananaev
Not everyone needs to integrate forum and payment system. A simple static
website or a blog can be done in much less time.

------
MikeGale
I always thought this was pretty simple. Google wants surveillance of
everybody. AMP is a way to advance that.

You can generally revise an AMP URL to make it normal.

~~~
dbbk
You have to first understand what AMP is before you can revise the URL though.
The vast majority of people do not know what AMP is, or that they interact
with it.

------
supernintendo
The actual title of this article seems more appropriate: "Google AMP Can Go To
Hell"

------
greenspot
I am bit surprised about this article. The momentum around AMP slowed down.
AMP pages do not rank that well anymore as when they were introduced. Also
within Google, there is no unanimity about the future of AMP. But maybe I got
the signals wrong.

------
paradite
I don't think Google is at wrong here for pushing its standard for its
business. It is just doing what it's expected to do as a business.

The problem is people getting comfortable with Google and depend on Google too
much. In the end, Google is in a position to force decisions on everyone.

If you are not happy with the way Google is doing things, stop using Google
products and develop or use alternatives.

------
cjhanks
The AMP thing continues to make me a little perturbed.

Because theoretically the damn thing should work - Google's QUIC protocol is
often the only protocol my shitty internet can support. It's wonderful.

Shouldn't AMP be using QUIC, does it? If it does - then there is something
seriously wrong with the cache/prefetch algorithm in the AMP CDN. Because
sometimes cold pages refuse to load!

------
iamleppert
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=9m03s&v=pr5cIRruBsc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=9m03s&v=pr5cIRruBsc)

This video is hilarious. Applause for a slight cosmetic change to a URL that
basically amounts to a subdomain?

How do people at Google find such work fulfilling? If I was given such a
meaningless project I'd be depressed. It seems that at a certain point such
large companies run out of real work to do, and insist on making such changes
that don't really matter anymore just to create work for people to do and
present on stage.

This is going against everything that the web stands for. I assume the next
logical step in this line of thinking is for Google to require developers to
start making pull requests to Chrome when we want to change the style of the
text on one of our pages?

It seems like what could have happened at Google is they are fed up with web
sites draining the battery on their precious Android devices and want so
desperately to beat Apple in the battery life game they are willing to neuter
the web in order to do it.

This is exactly what happens when you hire an aggressive queen and don't have
any checks and balances in your behemoth tech company that is becoming more
and more accustomed to her dark soul.

~~~
Jyaif
> they are fed up with web sites draining the battery on their precious
> Android devices and want so desperately to beat Apple in the battery life
> game

That... does not make any sense. If anything, it will increase the relative
lead of Apple in the battery life game.

It's about not having information being more and more stuck in Apple News / FB
because those silos are more efficient than the web. If people use apps
instead of the web, Google will earn less money.

------
jacquesm
Let's not pretend we're surprised.

------
dreamcompiler
The solution to speedy web pages is for the browser makers to give the user
fine-grained control over javascript. E.G. your page gets 100kB of js (which
could be gzipped) and then no more js for you. Or we throttle your js
performance after that. Or you have to pay the user $.001 for each 100kB after
the first 100kB.

~~~
james33
Not every web page is "just" a web page. It is perfectly legitimate to have
1-2MB of JS on a page if that page is a full game for example.

~~~
dreamcompiler
So let the user whitelist those. That's part of what "fine-grained" implies.

------
mvaliente2001
I won't comment about the merits of AMP, just something that bugged me about
the first paragraph. The author questions if a project is open source due to
their authors and main contributors, which seems very odd. A license is a
license is a license, don't confuse it with external issues.

------
erik_seaberg
Have they fixed the content negotiation thing yet? I want to serve either
valid HTML or AMP based on what the caller supports. Inventing a different URL
for every possible presentation is a problem that HTTP already solved.

------
bla2
The domain is called "polemic digital" and -- surprise -- offers a polemic
view to cash in on amp hate. That it's doing so well over here is a nice
example of polemic half truths doing well on social media.

~~~
drb91
Yes, really good social media would only discuss fact.

------
xiaodai
I actually like AMP because when I see the symbol I know the page will load
almost instantly when I click on it. People that spend time on getting their
page AMP-ready has less of the garbage click-bait stuff.

------
adarsh_thampy
Google simply wants to build a walled garden which it controls. The whole
point of AMP was to speed up sites on slow networks. Increasingly, I am seeing
AMP even on extremely fast networks. Why?

------
qrbLPHiKpiux
If G wants this, then there must be government oversight. One person (as
corporations are defined as a person) can not be the sole dispenser of
information. That’s too much power.

~~~
hallihax
I suspect a large part of the reason G wants this is _because_ the
government(s) want oversight. There has been a concerted effort in the last
few years for governments to pressure web giants into creating centralised
means of controlling what users see. Make absolutely no mistake: governments
will _love_ this idea.

------
Fej
One thing I don't understand: why does _Bing_ push AMP in their news section?
It's not a different instance either, it's the canonical AMP Project.

------
Animats
It worked before. Google converted Netnews into Google Groups.

------
Jazgot
Well, Google implementation of AMP is major reason why I mostly stopped using
Google search. They seems to be blind or just don't care any more.

------
Iem3ohvi
amp.js? No thanks. A blessed subset of the HTML, CSS and media that is
optimized for load times and memory footprint? Ok.

~~~
anoncoward111
Orrr we could just demand that people build sites like this willingly and then
we all don't have to let megabucks-Google become the arbiter of right and
wrong?

~~~
Iem3ohvi
Well, that just isn't happening and hasn't happened for years. So someone
stepping up to define a standard focused on performance is a good thing in
principle. You also need incentives for that standard to get adopted. Of
course google shouldn't be the only player here, others should participate in
this too.

------
baxtr
The best thing about AMP? It’s the chain symbol on top of the screen that
gives you the “real” page link.

------
blattimwind
And I want ice water in hell. Looks like we're both going to be disappointed
when we get there.

------
miluge
I know that you are one of my main traffic provider big G but you can go to
hell with AMP.

------
Kalium
Good.

In my experience, AMP pages are leaps and bounds better than the full-fat
experience. There's far less tracking, far fewer ads, and less asynchronously
loaded core content. All of these mean that the page loads much faster and is
a generally better experience.

------
lokimedes
How about going back to WAP, it was such a good idea at the time.

------
nkkollaw
You have to give it to Google, they ambitious: people use ad blockers, they
want to change how every single website is made to be able to bypass ad
blocker.

I think it's just genius.

------
formatkaka
Do no evil GOOGLE

------
johnlbevan2
tldr; In this case AMP != Apache + MySql + PHP

------
tzakrajs
AMP is a practice in anti-competitive moat building that net-neutrality
enforcement would obviate.

~~~
k_sh
Is it? I've never heard of net neutrality being applied to web standards -
only carriers and usage pricing/prioritization.

To me, this sounds like antitrust, not net neutrality.

~~~
tzakrajs
AMP exists, primarily, because content publishers cannot afford to have the
points of presence that Google has (e.g. Google Global Cache, Google Data
Centers). The residential ISP oligopoly makes it so that only big players
(e.g. Netflix, Google) who can peer directly with the ISPs get sufficient
bandwidth to compete at a reasonable price. Everyone else gets to pay the
premium to the middlemen (e.g. Akamai, Level 3) or bend the knee to Google for
their market access via AMP. Publishers also must be competitive on the
biggest search engine in town and the enhanced page ranking of AMP articles
probably forces the issue for most.

------
sureaboutthis
I knew the headline was coming. Just waiting for the day they start charging
for using AMP.

------
devoply
There are many things Google wants, for the past decade most people have been
going along with those demands. Perhaps it's time for us to tell Google what
we want.

~~~
xvector
Not possible. Google has the web in a vice grip. Don't agree with their
policies, drop in ranking, no one sees your disagreements.

~~~
drb91
This is only true for people who rely on google searches to drive traffic.

------
browsercoin
what irks me is that there seems to be no plans to address the google.com
issue. This really kills it for AMPs honestly.

I guess PWA + AMP = PWAMP is not really a thing?

edit: and of course pwamp.com is taken.

~~~
patrickaljord
There you go [https://www.ampproject.org/docs/guides/pwa-
amp](https://www.ampproject.org/docs/guides/pwa-amp)

------
empreintes
for god shake... AMP can go to hell

------
ghostbrainalpha
Next thing you know... Reddit won't allow linking out of its website.

All the content, even the advertisements will have to be built as Reddit
posts.

------
trumped
D-minus for AMP, and D-minus for Angular while I'm at it... the later one for
obfuscating the web.

Edit: I posted 1 comment in the last 2 days on HN and now try to post a link
and I get this error: "You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks."
please 1 upvote and I might be able to share an interesting story... LOL...
the mods here would make a carnage if they were in a real power position.
Thanks Dang...

?

~~~
dang
We rate limit accounts when they post too many unsubstantive comments or get
involved in flamewars. The fix is to give us reason to believe that you'll use
HN as intended in the future. When people do that at hn@ycombinator.com we're
happy to remove the rate limit. But you have to mean it!

