
An open governance model for the AMP Project - baldfat
https://amphtml.wordpress.com/2018/09/18/governance/
======
niftich
This move is aimed to quell the critique based on a hypothetis that
contributions to AMP that go against Google's vision would be rejected. It
also is a move in good faith to transition the project's governance away from
Google to a goal-oriented crew of many interested parties who can derive
benefit from its solutions.

I've written about AMP on here a lot [1], and frequently include this
disclaimer. My views on it have evolved as time went on, being more
sympathetic to some of the critiques, but also to the efforts of the AMP team
to address many of the complaints.

While a number of technical critiques to AMP remain, increasingly, the
criticism is:

\- ideological (e.g. "Google is trying to destroy the open web"),

\- misinformed (e.g. "Google is stealing traffic from publishers"),

\- nihilist (e.g. "everyone who uses AMP only does so because you need it to
rank high in search"),

\- full of naïve bravado (e.g. "all we need is clean HTML"),

\- or related to the fact that Google's mobile search page has stealth-morphed
into a captive newsreader that surfaces AMP-ified articles with Javascript
without ever leaving the page.

Out of these, the lattermost is the only one that raises a true
anticompetitive concern, which Google seems keen on ignoring. However, I'd say
that's for the Google Search team, rather than the AMP team, to address.

[1]
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=niftich%20%22AMP%22&sort=byDat...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=niftich%20%22AMP%22&sort=byDate&type=comment)

~~~
user812
Tech is always something that can be solved.

It doesn't change the fact that AMP is mostly about Google et al. gaining
control over the web.

\- What you call ideological is a mere fact; google is by definition not an
open source movement, and it is creating things with the primary purpose of
gaining more users into their own gated ecosystem

\- Google is obviously gaining control about how content is rendered, which
makes it possible for google to control the monetarization

\- If you ever spent some time among SEO and marketing people this is a pretty
obvious conclusion, as those people usually run that part of a company

\- There are very simple solutions available for making websites faster, it
just so happened that AMP was a great way for Google to kill two birds with
one stone, i.e. making the web faster and more googly at the same time; their
incentives are just not so aligned with other parties

All in all the entire thing is similar to the attitude of Google with their
plan of changing how URLs work.

The problem is not that it is in their best interest to control the web, the
problem is that Google seems entirely unaware as a company that others want to
have a different version of our future, and that it is entirely legitimate to
not use Google solutions as a foundation of that future.

As a whole company, Google appears to be somehwat autistic to me.

"But this is good for everyone" Google says. No it isn't.

The way Google is crippling open source is by offering open source on paper,
but then controlling the gateways, like forcing smartphone manufacturers to
ship their version of Android. So on the leadership level it is also acting
deeply hypocritical.

~~~
magicalist
Autistic? Really?

Looking beyond that, it would be nice if you had engaged with the GP post
instead of talking past it. Most of your post seems to back up the summary
there.

Like, "makes it possible for google to control the monetarization"...in what
way? It always comes up in these threads that you can include any ad network
in AMP pages, but it always comes up again.

> _their plan of changing how URLs work_

Their non-specific plan that displaying URLs in the location bar needs work?

~~~
user812
"...in what way?"

First, by crushing all the smaller players in ad-tech that can't keep up with
all the criteria needed to be included in AMP (Ads are very limited on AMP).
Fundamentally, by essentially controlling how content and ads are displayed
and being directly involved in this with a lot of available resources and no
barrier to entry. It is a bit subtle, which is why others are still playing
along right now.

Regarding the URL thing, they announced "Oh by the way, we have too look into
this URL thing, we may change that during the next years, it's not good"

This was published via Twitter.

When devs complained and said that things like this needs to be discussed
openly and not via invitation to the Google HQ, they got ignored.

This is what I mean with 'autistic', which maybe isn't accurate, I don't know.
You could probably say 'arrogant' instead.

Here's a very fitting quote:

"This guise of openness is perhaps even worse than the Apple News Format,
which at the very least does not pretend to be an open standard."

[https://80x24.net/post/the-problem-with-amp/](https://80x24.net/post/the-
problem-with-amp/)

Google pretending to be so open and good, while actually being no different to
Apple, MS, FB, etc.

That's the Google culture, apparently.

~~~
infogulch
> all the criteria needed to be included in AMP (Ads are very limited on AMP)

What does this mean, specifically? It sounds like you're saying that
advertisers have to get their shit together and not provide a crummy
experience to users to be valid AMP.

What, no more monkey punching? No more meta-meta-meta ad networks that load 4
nested networks that sit in your browser and auction off the right to auction
off the right to display an ad? No more epilepsy-triggering flashing images?
No more 2MB js-based animations that kill your battery life and distract you?
That sounds... great actually, where can I sign up?

~~~
user812
AMP certainly has benevolent side effects for the user. Google is obviously
adding tremendous value to what they offer.

It was a genius move by Google to come up with AMP.

How can you solve the problem of an ad-infested web if you make most of your
money with Ads? You can't simply block your competition within the dominant
browser, that would bring anti-trust action on the scene.

AMP is the answer. You create something that makes publishers give up their
freedom willingly.

Then Google realized that even AMP is too dangerous in the current culture of
techlash. So they came up with this idea of creating an open governance model.
The public is basically forcing them to do this step, which is a good first
step.

~~~
infogulch
It's not very surprising that google's is the first major ad network that is
AMP compatible (it's not my favorite part either), but the requirements are
quite public [1]. I'm also very glad that AMP is moving to an open governance
model, this step is absolutely necessary to make any real headway to becoming
more widely adopted.

In an ideal world AMP would just be a validation step -- defined as a specific
subset of technologies and behaviors -- that search engines and your browser
performs when indexing/viewing content, and then a system for reporting
violations back up to inform ranking. Since we're living in my fantasy land
lets also have all publishers host their own first party ads too.

> makes publishers give up their freedom

There's nothing about AMP that _inherently_ requires giving up freedom. Who
hosts the content is mostly a matter of caching and data locality (which just
so happens the vast majority of publishers fail at), and non-google ad
networks are fully supported.

[1]:
[https://www.ampproject.org/docs/ads/a4a_spec](https://www.ampproject.org/docs/ads/a4a_spec)

------
kodablah
I think we can do better than AMP. How about having no Google affiliation and
making it a strict subset of HTML+CSS? Those AMP tags make the likelihood of
independent implementations much lower. Can we just remove client-side
dynamism/interactivity from the picture at least at first or as an option? We
can go a long way with pure, strict, reduced HTML+CSS (still includes HTML
forms). I've been toying with this idea myself [0], but the key is strictness
and complete no-runtime-needed backwards compat w/ current HTML+CSS. And for
goodness sake, no proxies, pre-rendering, etc.

0 - [https://github.com/cretz/software-
ideas/issues/92](https://github.com/cretz/software-ideas/issues/92)

~~~
mattmanser
Why is it needed at all? We have HTML, we have an agreed upon governance for
it.

Page load speeds are, frankly, none of Google's business and click jacking is
a disgusting practice.

It's a text book case of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. All the Devs working on
this project should be deeply ashamed of themselves.

~~~
infogulch
> Page load speeds are, frankly, none of Google's business

If I as a user care about page speed when choosing between search results
(many do, _every single amp-related thread_ has several, this one included),
then Google cares and it _is_ their business.

If the industry were capable of making fast web pages then they'd already be
doing it. Claiming that "only using some features of system X" is equivalent
to "use system Y which is defined as a subset of X" because a technical
comparison claims that they're the same is completely missing the mark.

~~~
mattmanser
And heroin makes you feel great, doesn't mean you should pay attention to
anyone who says they like it.

The consequences of accepting AMP are so severe that it doesn't matter if some
people like the faster load times, it is utterly irrelevant.

------
joemaller1
This doesn't change the bad smell. AMP feels like it's being forced on us to
appease Google so sites will appear in search rankings.

The kerfuffle over React's licensing was different. React was a tool the
community loved that was hamstrung by a license and opaque ties to Facebook.
React's licensing switch was a liberation, this feels like appeasement.

One possible upside, this should provide some long-term stability -- something
Google is generally not good at.

~~~
kbenson
> React was a tool the community loved

AMP is a feature that users love. The difference between the two is that here
there's a much higher ratio of developers, and most users don't realize when
they are using AMP. If you gave them a comparison of a fast loading light page
or not (just compare a site's page pre and post them deploying AMP
capability), I'm confident this would be easily shown.

There are some problems with AMP, and there are some problems with how Google
utilizes it, but it _does_ help the problem of page bloat and slow loading
pages.

> React's licensing switch was a liberation, this feels like appeasement.

A lot of the complaints are about Google's control over AMP, and how they
might change it in the future in directions that are harmful for the minority.
This does address that somewhat. I see them as very similar. Both are projects
where a large company spurred release for their own reasons, but had to make
it more open to appease the public and actually get more of the adoption they
wanted.

~~~
walterbell
_> AMP is a feature that users love._

AMP requires me to manually edit URLs to remove AMP before sharing, several
times per day, because some people have an aversion to MitM between their
browser and publishers.

~~~
kbenson
> AMP requires me to manually edit URLs to remove AMP before sharing

That's Google's usage of AMP pages, not necessarily AMP itself though, right?

~~~
vec
There is no "AMP itself" outside of Google. The AMP project consists of three
parts[1]:

1\. a specification for an HTML/CSS subset (almost) which is relatively easy
for browsers to render efficiently.

2\. an open source client-side JS library designed to automatically apply a
number of performance optimizations to pages written against the specification
above

3\. a closed-source proprietary proxy server designed to further optimize
content delivery for pages written with the above tooling.

The first two are pretty awesome; full stop. The third one is probably also
pretty awesome from a technical perspective, but it's hard to say for sure
since I can't spin up my own proxy server to find out.

AMP pages can be served without the proxy layer, but then they're not really
AMP pages. They're just unusually svelte HTML pages with some slightly
esotreric JS runtime extensions. In order for the end user to actually get
most of the benefits of AMP the page needs to be filtered through a compatible
proxy, and that means Google (or Cloudflare, who also host a proxy layer with
Google's blessing).

I've got nothing against Google's proprietary tools. I've got a Gmail account,
all my spreadsheets live in Google Docs, I still miss Reader. But let's call a
spade a spade. AMP is fundamentally a proprietary Google offering with a
handful of open source components. Nothing short of enabling third parties to
host their own proxy servers will change that fundamental fact.

[1]:
[https://www.ampproject.org/learn/overview/](https://www.ampproject.org/learn/overview/)

------
mmastrac
Google AMP was never great as a standard. It's too fuzzy and random and nobody
_really_ cares about it beyond the search ranking benefits.

I understand where they were coming from, but creating a reduced-interaction,
faster-loading HTML subset would require way more spec work than they put in
to be self-consistent and long-term maintainable.

This is the same sort of reason PNaCl didn't get traction. Both were great
science projects, but neither was appropriate as a long-term standard.
Hopefully we'll see the WebAssembly equivalent to AMP from the ashes of that
project.

~~~
cramforce
There is a lot of movement in that direction. This was the start
[https://www.ampproject.org/latest/blog/standardizing-
lessons...](https://www.ampproject.org/latest/blog/standardizing-lessons-
learned-from-amp/)

------
jaredcwhite
I will never, _ever_ deploy AMP on my website or any website I have any
control over. One poster in this thread made a dismissive statement about
ideological criticism of AMP "(e.g. "Google is trying to destroy the open
web")". Well, I am absolutely happy to stand by that criticism. AMP is
diametrically opposed to the open web. The web is built upon three
_fundamental_ technologies, any of which—if replaced—constitute a platform
OTHER than the open web: HTML/CSS, HTTP, and URI/DNS.

Google seems keen on breaking down that last bit as recent updates to Chrome
demonstrate, and AMP is essentially a replacement for HTML. I don't see the
open web being appreciated or respected by the Google of today, and I plan to
do everything in my power to stand against this shocking land grab of
influence over the web not seen since the bad old days of 90s era Microsoft.

~~~
auslander
> I don't see the open web being appreciated or respected by the Google of
> today

I'd generalise it more, "I don't expect the open web being appreciated or
respected by any business." Business is to make money, preferably now, open or
not is irrelevant.

~~~
jaredcwhite
I hate having to think in such cynical terms, but I fear you are right.

------
user812
Is this Google getting desparate they will soon be seen as the monolithic
behemoth they are already?

AMP will definitely backfire in the hands of Google, but for an open standard
the model itself shouldn't be tied to their incentives in such a drastic way.

I know people in the media and publishers who despise everything AMP and would
do everything to get away from Google, but they can't due to heavy inertia of
creating alternatives in such a tightly controlled market dominated by a
single entity that is miles ahead when it comes to resources on all levels.

AMP is pursued by google to kick out competitive third parties from the mobile
ecosystem, that's all. It's nothing to be proud of, and doesn't solve a
problem except forcing selfish publishers to reconsider their patchwork of
dozens third parties cluttering and burdening the user (nowadays consumer).

A true solution is already there - it is called HTML + CSS, and if Google was
honest they would simply rank via speed, which they always did. There is
simply no problem. The only problem is that Google can't control the types of
third party scripts running on the fastest websites, that's why they created a
selfish solution to that problem.

Only because something is structurally open source, doesn't make it good, and
only because something is open source and structurally governed by multiple
entities, doesn't make it a worthwhile endeavour.

This is all about the big players controlling the narrative. Twitter,
Pinterest, Yahoo and eBay are not better than Google when it comes to letting
them define how the web works.

------
drenvuk
Why not simply weight the search results and make an open grading project?
Site loads slowly versus other sites that do similar things? Give it a C or a
D instead of an A. Weight the results instead of just giving the top to amp
pages. Easy.

~~~
cramforce
Ranking based on speed was launched this July
[https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2018/01/using-page-
speed-i...](https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2018/01/using-page-speed-in-
mobile-search.html)

~~~
drenvuk
Lovely, now they can get rid of AMP. It's an unwelcome distraction.

------
floatboth
But it's not the AMP itself that matters — it's Google's cache/CDN thingy that
only selects pages that are AMP…

~~~
bk_avalara
That's absolutely true. I just found out that there are currently two AMP
cache providers, Google and Cloudflare:
[https://www.ampproject.org/docs/fundamentals/how_cached](https://www.ampproject.org/docs/fundamentals/how_cached).

For users with some objection to Google, it's not clear to me how they are
supposed to change their personal AMP cache provider, like with a browser
configuration setting or something. Is it Cloudflare's intention that other
search engines like DDG use their AMP cache?

~~~
ocdtrekkie
AFAIK, Bing runs an AMP cache as well.

There's no such thing as a "personal AMP cache provider", as the AMP cache
used is mostly tied to "where you came from". Google Search will always use
Google's AMP cache, which is why the "you could always run your own AMP cache"
concept is silly.

The goal of AMP is functionally to allow your search engine to preload the
content from search results, at it's own origin. So any AMP-enabled search
engine would need to run it's own AMP cache and serve the site out of their
AMP cache. AMP doesn't realistically speed up web browsing in any other
context (it adds plenty of it's own JavaScript).

------
tusharsoni
Seems like they completely missed the point. They need to make search results
not rely on the page using AMP but just being light and fast. If the page uses
AMP to do that, great, if not, shouldn't matter.

~~~
cramforce
For that aspect see [https://www.ampproject.org/latest/blog/standardizing-
lessons...](https://www.ampproject.org/latest/blog/standardizing-lessons-
learned-from-amp/)

------
nebulous1
When they're giving contributor statistics are they talking about commits?
Looking at the commit log and contributors list on github, the vast majority
of the code appears to be written by google. It looks like they're counting a
user with a single commit equal alongside google developers who work on the
code base every other day.

------
auslander
EasyList, which most adblockers rely on, was asked to, and removed _amp-
analytics.js_ from it:

[https://github.com/easylist/easylist/commit/17e0447fb7c6df37...](https://github.com/easylist/easylist/commit/17e0447fb7c6df377a1081f730c5039c5396d0af)

[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42907284/ublock-
blocking...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42907284/ublock-blocking-amp-
experiment)

While they claim that it is not tracking, I call bullshit:

"..integrate your service into amp-analytics.. Consider if and how you will
track users across first-party and third-party AMP contexts."
[https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/28582dfdfb6d09f19...](https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/28582dfdfb6d09f1912d5bed0657c0dd97c1593c/extensions/amp-
analytics/integrating-analytics.md)

And there still be HTTP Referrer in the request:

[https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2018/01/31/preventing-
data...](https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2018/01/31/preventing-data-leaks-
by-stripping-path-information-in-http-referrers/)

------
c487bd62
Will you be able to use AMP without ever touching Google servers/services? So
it actually works like said subset of HTML to clean up the mess we're in. You
have to force those things directly in the core, you can already make pages
fast with current tech, that's probably why they also talk about ads in the
spec. At least for non-SPAs (I wouldn't complain about another layer for SPAs
that cleans up the rest of the web). You can't even open most of the official
AMP project pages and docs with JS disabled, that's often a red flag.

I'm not really an expert on AMP, but would only support it if they actually
made things better without pushing for their own services or pull things like
AMP for Gmail, variations of EEE.

~~~
Jyaif
> Will you be able to use AMP without ever touching Google servers/services?

Well yeah, and AFAIK it was always the case. If you use Bing, you'll touch
MS's AMP cache.

------
Aeolun
I don’t think this is going to affect my opinion of google one way or another,
but coming so short on the heels of a bunch of controversy, I have to wonder
at their motivations.

------
michelb
The secret to getting rid of AMP may be to actually adopt it, and be happy
about it. That way Google will end-of-life it soon.

------
justtopost
I am agast at the comment section here. The number of people seemingly
purposly misunderstanding or misrepresenting a rather simple issue is
disheartening. I know talk of shills is frowned upon here, but you can't
really ignore it in threads like these. What is the HN approved way to call
these, often high ranking, accounts out? I don't want to rock boats but this
is absurd.

~~~
grzm
From the guidelines
([https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)):

> _" Please don't impute astroturfing or shillage. That degrades discussion
> and is usually mistaken. _If you're worried about it, email us and we'll
> look at the data. _"_

You can contact the mods via the Contact link in the footer.

~~~
justtopost
Fair enough. But the nature of the beast makes a semi-well thought out
promotion and/or suppression campaign rather hard to pin down in concrete
terms. Perhaps just a loyal fanbase or independent employee or 2 is
responsible, but I cant exactly sumbit a smoking gun now can I?

This whole policy seems rife for abuse. But I honestly don't know a better
way, without introducing adjunt issues. My sincere apologies if I reduced the
quality of discourse as implied in the guidelines.

------
auslander
Found it in 2yo discussion, totally agree:

The reason for AMP is surveillance capitalism. If you absolutely, positively
believe you have to track your users, writing simple web pages is not an
option.

Your choice is either the status quo (pull in lots of third-party cruft), or
having a fast-loading page where Google runs the tracking and advertising
infrastructure.

The docs explain that "AMP analytics is specifically designed to measure once
and report to many". Google's not trying to drive out other players, they're
making sure they run the table.

(c) idlewords on Sept 21, 2016
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12541966](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12541966)

------
sam0x17
Now they just need to move it to the trash bin.

Edit: The whole point of AMP is so Google can gain more influence and lock out
competitors in the search space. The original article said they have decided
to "move AMP into open governance". It is therefore hilarious (and
substantive) to say they should "move it into the trash".

~~~
dang
Please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

Also: " _Please don 't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's
work. A good critical comment teaches us something._"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
sam0x17
Note: you guys should really get admin badges for actual HN admins. I thought
this was some rando pedantically quoting the rules (and/or an actual Google
shill) in response to what would be a straightforward typical comment on any
other tech news platform. That said this has seriously shaken my confidence in
the quality of discourse on HN and ruined my day. I miss slashdot.

~~~
Bjartr
(I had a nice long thought-out response for you until a windows update popup
appeared mid-sentence, and I accidentally triggered it. Maybe I'll write it
all out again later, maybe not. What I write now is a much condensed version)

> you guys should really get admin badges for actual HN admins.

That might be a good idea

> straightforward typical comment on any other tech news platform

I visit HN explicitly because it's not a typical tech news platform and isn't
full of those typical comments.

> It is therefore hilarious (and substantive)

hilarious != substantive

It was a shallow dismissal, however you slice it. Such comments are not
welcome on HN. Please don't post them.

> What's so hypocritical about you guys is you upvoted it until dang
> commented.

Upvotes are not king here. Just because people upvoted it does not mean it was
a good comment.

> That said this has seriously shaken my confidence in the quality of
> discourse on HN and ruined my day.

I am confused that how your comment fared in upvotes somehow has something to
do with the quality of discourse on HN. There was no discourse. The fact that
you got upvotes _but no responses_ means that despite the fact people engaged
with your comment, they didn't discuss anything. There was no discourse.
(until my own attempt at a meta-response)

And yes, believe it or not, all that is _still_ shorter than what I originally
wrote.

~~~
sam0x17
> I am confused that how your comment fared in upvotes somehow has something
> to do with the quality of discourse on HN. There was no discourse. The fact
> that you got upvotes but no responses means that despite the fact people
> engaged with your comment, they didn't discuss anything. There was no
> discourse. (until my own attempt at a meta-response)

Nothing to do with the upvotes, but you feeling the need to chime in and
police.

~~~
Bjartr
> but you feeling the need to chime in and police.

I hadn't responded prior to writing that, I'm a different person to the one
who mentioned the HN guidelines, so I'm confused who exactly you are referring
to as "you". Would you mind clarifying?

