Offer better experiences on their websites and apps, the technology is available but publishers choose to shovel crap in with food and call it beef tenderloin. Now Google is offering something better.
What did you expect Google to do when Apple News Format and Facebook Instant Articles are creeping up? Both offer impressive experiences and this isn't even nearly as impossibly mind-boggling.
AMP is an open standard that any publisher and any search engine can implement and if all search engines get on board then users win so much -- pages load faster, they require much less network bandwidth, they're easier to read. Nobody, absolutely nobody, will have sympathy for publishers after all the bullshit we're being forced to experience both now and historically.
If your argument is "other walled gardens are doing it too", it sounds like we have the same understanding of the problem. You just seem to think it's ok and I don't.
My argument is Google took an alternative road here, like they did with SPDY and HTTP/2 development -- they developed an open standard and threw their weight behind it. I don't see how AMP is a walled garden since any and all other search engines are free to implement the standard as well. Content aggregators like HN can cache and serve up AMP pages as well.
The only controversial thing here is this: publishers' content is being cached and re-hosted on a platform outside of their control. This is a non-issue because publishers are opting into this system.
Keep in mind, AMP pages on google aren't just fast because you're not using bloated javascript, they're fast because:
- The JS that is used is CDN cached and shared with all other AMP sites
- You're loading the content from the same origin (google.com) so no need to establish a new TLS connection, or look up DNS, etc
- Google's servers/networking/etc stack is very fast, faster than what is in reach of most sites
- The new content is loaded into the existing DOM of the search page, which can be much faster
And probably the most damning:
- Google will eagerly-load the contents of the first few results, making them not just fast but 100% instant.
What choice do sites have?