8 ms·

Google AMP Is a Threat to the Open Web

228 points by zodiakzz 9y ago

ocdtrekkie 9y ago
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?
- lerie82 9y ago
  Yes, use a different search engine.
- arkh 9y ago
  Just consider the commercial web as a lost cause: this is the centralized, identity enabled network companies want. Focus on the anonymous decentralized efforts to develop tools for the open web. If most people don't care about their data and the security of the web, you can't make them.
- sseth 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      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 9y ago
        How so? Google controls over 85% of the devices those mobile apps run on, and they sell ads through those apps as well.
lukestevens 9y ago
I attempted to discuss related issues regarding AMP Email with @cramforce, the AMP tech lead, here: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13457#issuecomment-367189418 https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13457#issuecomm... The discussion, if nothing else, sheds some degree of light on how the AMP tech lead sees the situation.
tamrix 9y ago
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.
mrtksn 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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.
Kiro 9y ago
How can I see that someone visited my site if it's served by Google's cache?
- tyler_larson 9y ago
  There are multiple analytics options supported with amp. It's a well-addressed problem space. But honestly, if you're so far behind the curve that this is even a question, then amp is not for you. You've got a lot of bigger problems to solve first.
  - Kiro 9y ago
    What do you mean by that? What bigger problems?
  - wwweston 9y ago
    The GP may or may not have bigger problems to solve, but they could be forgiven for entirely ignoring a response that simultaneously manages to provide no specific or concrete information, sound haughty, and imply that understanding of the ins & outs of working with AMP are the standard for not having to worry about some other also nonspecific (but definitely bigger!) problem. I could assume you have bigger problems to solve than writing a stronger reply, but it's hard to spot that out to somebody who bothered to write an answer in the first place.
- tankenmate 9y ago
  Not allowing you to directly contact people you know or work with is a feature not a bug.</s> Welcome to the world where Google intermediates all your future communication. No doubt for your own good.
- dx034 9y ago
  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.
tanilama 9y ago
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 9y ago
  As a user, I hate AMP: it breaks links, it breaks browser behaviour on mobile
  - dx034 9y ago
    But to be fair, many pages break links and browser behaviour without AMP as well.
    - nugi 9y ago
      Yes, but why enforce the poor experince?
  - LocutusOfBorges 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      Wasn't this a safari bug?
      - dmitriid 9y ago
        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.
- TPPOW0020 9y ago
whyagaindavid 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      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.
- welcomebrand 9y ago
  I think there's an element of them forcing an entirely new Google standard (then favouring it in their results) on to something they could just as easily punish (slow sites) directly. Slow sites can be sped up quite often with small optimisations and improvements and those improvements can be guided by Google tools but instead they're forcing their own new format in the name of speed.
- wwweston 9y ago
sureaboutthis 9y ago
>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-amp/ https://timkadlec.com/remembers/2018-02-14-the-two-faces-of-... More: https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2018/02/linkbait_37.html https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2018/02/linkbait_37...
thinkMOAR 9y ago
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."
SnowingXIV 9y ago
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.

228 points by zodiakzz 9y ago

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?

lerie82 9y ago
Yes, use a different search engine.
arkh 9y ago
Just consider the commercial web as a lost cause: this is the centralized, identity enabled network companies want. Focus on the anonymous decentralized efforts to develop tools for the open web. If most people don't care about their data and the security of the web, you can't make them.
sseth 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      How so? Google controls over 85% of the devices those mobile apps run on, and they sell ads through those apps as well.

lukestevens 9y ago

I attempted to discuss related issues regarding AMP Email with @cramforce, the AMP tech lead, here: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13457#issuecomment-367189418 https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13457#issuecomm... The discussion, if nothing else, sheds some degree of light on how the AMP tech lead sees the situation.

tamrix 9y ago

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.

mrtksn 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.

Kiro 9y ago

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

tyler_larson 9y ago
There are multiple analytics options supported with amp. It's a well-addressed problem space. But honestly, if you're so far behind the curve that this is even a question, then amp is not for you. You've got a lot of bigger problems to solve first.
- Kiro 9y ago
  What do you mean by that? What bigger problems?
- wwweston 9y ago
  The GP may or may not have bigger problems to solve, but they could be forgiven for entirely ignoring a response that simultaneously manages to provide no specific or concrete information, sound haughty, and imply that understanding of the ins & outs of working with AMP are the standard for not having to worry about some other also nonspecific (but definitely bigger!) problem. I could assume you have bigger problems to solve than writing a stronger reply, but it's hard to spot that out to somebody who bothered to write an answer in the first place.
tankenmate 9y ago
Not allowing you to directly contact people you know or work with is a feature not a bug.</s> Welcome to the world where Google intermediates all your future communication. No doubt for your own good.
dx034 9y ago
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.

tanilama 9y ago

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 9y ago
As a user, I hate AMP: it breaks links, it breaks browser behaviour on mobile
- dx034 9y ago
  But to be fair, many pages break links and browser behaviour without AMP as well.
  - nugi 9y ago
    Yes, but why enforce the poor experince?
- LocutusOfBorges 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    Wasn't this a safari bug?
    - dmitriid 9y ago
      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.
TPPOW0020 9y ago

whyagaindavid 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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.
welcomebrand 9y ago
I think there's an element of them forcing an entirely new Google standard (then favouring it in their results) on to something they could just as easily punish (slow sites) directly. Slow sites can be sped up quite often with small optimisations and improvements and those improvements can be guided by Google tools but instead they're forcing their own new format in the name of speed.
wwweston 9y ago

sureaboutthis 9y ago

>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-amp/ https://timkadlec.com/remembers/2018-02-14-the-two-faces-of-... More: https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2018/02/linkbait_37.html https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2018/02/linkbait_37...

thinkMOAR 9y ago

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."

SnowingXIV 9y ago

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.