12 ms·

AMP: the missing controversy

247 points by josephscott 9y ago

ocdtrekkie 9y ago
We were discussing with the AMP project tech lead over on GitHub trying to suss out details about governance and the like, and it's even scarier than we thought when it came to AMP4Email: Gmail is implementing AMP in email "the way they want to", and AMP Project is just deciding whether or not they want to support it/publish a 'standard'. I strongly recommend this for reading: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13597 https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13597 (locked, sadly) and the original AMP4Email issue has a fair bit as well: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13457 https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13457 (only for discussion of email). Unfortunately, there are lots of people talking about how bad AMP is, and why, but nobody yet has suggested how we do anything to stop it.
- mulmen 9y ago
  I think the best thing to do is just be the kind of online citizen you want to see. It may be small but it is something you can do yourself. I will be looking for a way to move my online identity away from Google to something I control more directly. I am also going to try replacing my social media activity with email. The web is already decentralized, we just need to use it.
  - pasbesoin 9y ago
    I just had to think a bit in the opposite direction, with respect to email. Archiving some correspondence from other contexts into it. There's a very handy tool for the archiving I'm interested in. But... under U.S. law, online email storage over X... (I forget the exact count, something over 100 days) days old, is open to examination without a warrant. Not that I've anything particular to hide. But moving my personal correspondence in that direction? I may spin up a an email server under my own sub-net, just to make use of this tool and capture its output. But I'm strongly disinclined to put it on a publicly facing email server.
    - mulmen 9y ago
      The 100 day warrantless examination is an interesting point. Are you suggesting the government doesn't have access to your correspondence on other platforms? You can at least run your own email server.
      - pasbesoin 9y ago
        It depends on the platform, and on ongoing developments in law, regulation, and third-party cooperation (one big way U.S. governments get around their own restrictions is by soliciting (often, paid) data from third parties not bound by such restrictions). Anyway, they may well have this data. Some other data, more likely not. And, even where they may have -- or have access to, this data, retention periods may be significantly shorter. At least, the retention periods that aren't shrouded in secrecy in e.g. a large campus in the middle of Utah. Not email, but more and more social/communications platforms are offering to archive your data in your Google Drive account. Now, maybe with a privately held passphrase to AES encryption, some might consider that ok. But that is not what these services are offering. For the majority of people, "Who cares?" And there is value to keeping your life free of unnecessary friction. But, more and more of this stuff is getting supeonaed in divorce cases, employment disputes, etc., etc. Though, I suppose if you maintain private access to the messages, and don't share them, you are still a candidate for contempt of court. Anyway, I'm not interested in accumulating more of my social life into a data store that, here in the U.S., has less constraints against third-party (here, meaning particularly, government) access.
        mulmen 9y ago
        Ok but what is the alternative for online communication?
        pasbesoin 9y ago
        Well, I like the idea of end-to-end encryption, combined with storage/archiving on equipment under my own control. Email seems fine, if it's your own server and you can keep it secure. Including, secure from some legal argument that they can knock on your door or the data center's and just have a look at whatever they want. There was a fellow in the UK who used assymmetric keys to encrypt all his inbound email, holding it on the server in encrypted form where the paired key was not on the server but rather available only to his email client. Then, you have the problem of security in transit. That email doesn't offer, inherently. And most of your correspondents won't use PGP/GPG nor SMIME. I just had another friend start using WhatsApp. Is it really secure? I don't know. At least, she'll use it. WhatsApp offers to archive your correspondence to Google Drive. I haven't turned that on. I've tried brining up Signal with a few friends, but they won't give it the time of day. (Unlike the Washington, DC crowd, who now appear to be flocking to it in minor degree.) The tool I might use is for SMS/MMS. It used to also offer to archive WhatsApp conversations, but that's been discontinued. Umm... https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.zegoggles.smssync/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.zegoggles.smssync/ It's also on Play. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zegoggles.smssync&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zegoggles.... So yeah, this isn't any "big security context". Just my personal stuff. But the default is to put the messages into Gmail. On the one hand, actually convenient. On the other... just, no. I have a bootlooped Nexus 5x with a bunch of SMS/MMS I never backed up. Including, I now realize, from a friendship that's ended. I'd kind of like to have some of those. So, I'd like to be pro-active with regard to the next phone that's going to crap out on me. ---- P.S. In short, I think I basically agree with you. Decentralized, and under one's own control. It's just that: Email doesn't secure the transport, and many people won't secure their messages before transport. If it's not your own email server, under your control including perhaps physical, law in the U.S. with respect to email designates older messages as quasi-abandoned and "up for grabs". And I forgot to mention the many posts/comments I've been reading here, about how more and more difficult it's becoming to run your own email server, not just in terms of securing it but also because more and more email providers are shit-canning any emails that don't appear to be blessed by their counterparts. Anyway, I'm not promoting the idea that I have some particularly good answer. Rather, just food for thought.
  - robin_reala 9y ago
    I closed my G Suite account today because of Google’s announcement of AMP for Email. Luckily I didn’t have a huge Google presence in the first place beyond email which is easily IMAPed over to another server. Takeout allowed me to extract the rest: my docs as ODF, YouTube subs as RSS and contacts as ICS. If anyone’s interested I wrote up my investigation into potential replacement mail services: http://www.robinwhittleton.com/2018/02/18/dropping-g-suite/ http://www.robinwhittleton.com/2018/02/18/dropping-g-suite/ . In the end I went with Runbox, will see how they perform but I’m happy so far.
    - PuffinBlue 9y ago
      Be sure to look at Zoho.eu too. I think it means all your criteria. They have a dedicated EU service now. I use them and RunBox.
    - watchdogtimer 9y ago
      Another option is simply sign up for a shared hosting account. You'd get all of the features you're looking for and more for equal or less money.
    - tombrossman 9y ago
      > In the end I went with Runbox, will see how they perform but I’m happy so far. I tried Runbox back in 2013 after a fair amount of research and they looked great. After signing up, they sent a confirmation email with all my account info with user-name and password in clear text. I cancelled immediately after seeing this, but I wonder if they are still doing it? I ended up switching to Fastmail, which I still use and highly recommend.
      - robin_reala 9y ago
        I didn’t get that this time at least. It’s worth pointing out that while that’s not great, if they send the password before encrypting it for saving in the database and only send it internally to their own mail server then there’s little security risk. But it’s not best practise as it trains users to expect it from other sites.
  - jadedhacker 9y ago
    You're right, being the kind of citizen you want to be is undeniable a good thing, but it's also undeniably useless. It individualizes a collective problem, thereby being an ineffective solution. The only way to resist power is with collective action that substantially challenges it.
    - mulmen 9y ago
      I disagree with your defeatist message and I consider it harmful if spread. Individual action is the foundation of our entire social system. It is not "useless" by any measure. I don't want to use AMP in email so I'm not going to. It's just that easy. What are you doing and what do you suggest the rest of us do? Is voting with our wallets not a thing any longer?
      - k_sh 9y ago
        Jumping in under here to highlight your first point: collective action is, literally, a large set of coordinated individual actions.
        jadedhacker 9y ago
        That's true but the key word is coordinated. Without coordinated action, we're back at individual action. Coordinated action might be protests, boycotts, etc. Usually there are one or more _institutions_, that is a cohesive group of people, backing and advancing the interests of the group. This is a very powerful model. A familiar example is the NRA. It's not a political party, but it advances the interests of its members relentlessly. Institutions of the left include things like Planned Parenthood. Often, there are issue advocacy organizations that spring up when corporations are doing bad things. Often the strategy is to do things that impact the corporation financially, which short of legal threats is basically the only thing they understand. Anything short of that can be brushed off with rationalizations by various powerful stakeholders within the corporation. Basically, the point I'm trying to make is that individual action is essential, but not sufficient to make a difference when it counts.
  - mr_spothawk 9y ago
    I've been very pleased with the integration of Fastmail (calendar/notes/contacts/mail) with iOS & OSX along with DDG I find myself very well taken care of, and I can always type in Google if I need to (2 times a day?).
- dmitriid 9y ago
  Another issue that raises the same questions is closed and locked: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13623 https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13623 From the issue: > I think that the conversation itself is important and I'm always available on the internets. cramforce is https://twitter.com/cramforce https://twitter.com/cramforce
  - dmitriid 9y ago
    I'm also kinda trying to keep the issue alive here: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13600 https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13600
- paulddraper 9y ago
  I think we have to participate. It claims to be an open standard; we should participate (or try to participate) in the open standard. The problems AMP solves are real. They will be solved one way or another. I'm hopeful they can be solved in an HTMLite sort of way, not a whatever-Google-does sort of way. So let's think about how to improve AMP, change AMP, evolve AMP, until it becomes something else and something better than even its creators thought. Destroy it from the the inside. EDIT: I know AMP has been terribly approached, and it might be nice if it just disappeared. I'm not claiming otherwise. But it's not going to disappear the same way proprietary LiveScript didn't disappear. I don't want to just scream at walls; we've been trying that.
  - mulmen 9y ago
    The best way to improve AMP is to drag it out behind the wood shed and shoot it. People just need to get better at making mobile web pages.
    - paulddraper 9y ago
      I'm not saying you're wrong. But I will say I think your wood shed idea won't work. (Though I am very open to hearing more about it's implementation.)
      - mulmen 9y ago
        Yeah I don't think that's realistic either but validating Google by participating in their selfish initiative isn't going to do anyone any favors. Where you can oppose the adoption of AMP and work on improving the rest of the ecosystem so that AMP has fewer compelling applications.
  - JoshMnem 9y ago
    AMP isn't truly "open" technology. You can't even discuss its problems on Github without getting the conversation shut down. AMP is an insidious threat the the open WWW itself. It doesn't solve problems that can't be solved in better ways.
  - 9y ago
- tankenmate 9y ago
  Actually I did suggest something to stop it; return a 501 for any email that contains an application/amp+html part (even if it has other MIME parts). Doing this means the sender will have to change their behaviour not the receiver.
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    This is really the only way to reject AMP4Email: Refuse to allow it, so that companies wanting to reach their customers can't implement it. However, it's unlikely large mail providers would choose to do this, I can't imagine Microsoft or Yahoo taking such a stand. My own provider FastMail, has said they of course, can't promise they won't support AMP4Email since compatibility is a major goal of theirs, and I can't fault them for that. (And I significantly appreciate the contribution their blog has made to the discussion on the topic.) I'd love if I had the option to opt into behavior like this though, at least on a personal level. But if only a few percent of users (or more than likely, a fraction of a percent) are rejecting the mail, it won't dissuade anyone. Companies will pick up AMP4Email so they can push dynamic advertising directly in people's inboxes.
    - tankenmate 9y ago
      If you run Amavis you can add a MIME type to the $banned_filename_re in a conf file (on debian based derivatives you'll normally find that in /etc/amavis/conf.d/20-debian_defaults). qr'^application/amp+html$'i, is what I use. If you want to put it in a separate file (such as a local config file) then you can just push(@$banned_filename_re,qr'^application/amp+html$'i);
      - rav 9y ago
        Isn't the plus sign a special character in Perl regexes? That is, wouldn't you need to use this instead: qr'^application/amp\+html$'i,
        tankenmate 9y ago
        You're right, thanks! I still forget sometimes the differences between BRE, SRE, and ERE (mostly due to vim defaulting one thing and perl the other).
- IlPeach 9y ago
  I don't even think AMP is the problem. It feels more like an symptom. So the question really goes as: what's the actual problem? To keep it very short, it really does feel like to be around how the ad revenue works on the web. But maybe I'm just mistaken and I'm missing some pieces of the puzzle.
  - Waterluvian 9y ago
    I think you're right that it's a symptom. Take a perfectly fine system like email and, from a profitability perspective, see a problem and an opportunity.
  - hyder_m29 9y ago
    I don't think there's a problem. From what I gather, websites simply adopt AMP for the preferential treatment Google gives AMP pages. It's an SEO-hack.
  - spc476 9y ago
    I think the problem is Google. Between Page Rank, QUIC, HTTP/2.0 and AMP, Google is pretty much now dictating the terms of the Internet. For instance, how much longer before Google only accepts email from the "Big Players?" (or drastically lowers the performance/acceptance of email from smaller sites?)
- alsetmusic 9y ago
  > Unfortunately, there are lots of people talking about how bad AMP is, and why, but nobody yet has suggested how we do anything to stop it. I don’t follow amp links. Then again, I’m satisfied not signing up for twitter, or even loading their site as an outsider to get context when people link to tweets. I also killed my fb account about six months after registering (seven years ago). I clearly accept trade offs that don’t appeal to some. Others have mentioned switching to ddg to withdraw support from google. I will probably test the waters with that in the future. It’s not as though we are held hostage in the fashion that many are beholden to ISPs.
- rstephenson2 9y ago
  How about we create client-side plugins for each of the major platforms that people can use to detect the AMP mime-type and automatically mark as spam? Email reputation is a huge concern for senders and if there were enough people using the plugin it would poison the entire thing and may deter senders from using AMP entirely. Now, for the web AMP I have no idea...
- cromwellian 9y ago
  The real problem is, no one has proposed an alternative solution that solves the same problems. Either people claim it's not a problem (slow loading mobile sites driving people away from the web and onto mobile), or people claim it'll just fix itself because everywhere will just make fast pages if they're incentivized to (penalized SEO, users leaving their sites to use Facebook/Apple News) But that has been tried, and it didn't work, and you had people desperately blocking all JS, or going to native apps. My suggestion is, if you don't want people to use AMP, provide an alternative Web framework that provides similar performance, show in a side-to-side demo you can meet the same performance, take it to the W3C or IETF getting Mozilla to push it. No one on a crappy 3g connection really cares about the nuances of the politics here, they don't care bout Web vs native, they care only that their phone seems slow as molasses. If there is no Web solution, then you're going to see native apps with proprietary formats, in essence, non-standard RSS readers. And honestly, I really don't want to download the WashingtonPost, NYT, or Verge App to read articles less painfully. AMP is just JS using the Web Components spec, and some tools, the purveyors of JS frameworks like Vue, Ember, or various Bootstrap-like templates, could ship their own competing proposal. The way standards used to work on the internet is rough consensus and running code. People would propose multiple specs and implement them, working groups would evaluate the various solutions, and the best proposals would be folded in. Provide some competition for AMP and maybe there will be a different outcome. Google shipped NaCL in Chrome, and Asm.js defeated it. Google shipped SPDY, and it won and became HTTP/2. Less talk and politics, more shipping code.
  - dmitriid 9y ago
    Have you even read the article? The only reason AMP is perceived as better than anything out there is because Google aggressively preloads it. At best it's not better than anything else out there. Solutions to slow loading pages are well known and have nothing to do with AMP or "other web frameworks". Even Google themselves lay out the solutions: https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/rules https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/rules. Nowhere does it say AMP. And if you bothered to read the article, you'd see that Google's own tools consider Google's own AMP to be bad and non-performant. > Less talk and politics, more shipping code. That's exactly how and why we ended up with AMP.
- devgutt 9y ago
  The solution is not in the websites, but in search itself. Search needs to be broken down. One centralized search, once good, now is really dangerous for the open web.
- fchristant 9y ago
  hi, I'm the author of the article. I have no idea how to stop it. Bad press doesn't seem to matter, as this has been around for years. One longshot I could think of is reporting it to the EU as anti-competitive behavior. In the case of exclusive AMP preloading on a dominant market (search), it's not that far fetched.
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    As much as I'm really glad the EU is taking a stand on this, they're also taking too long. The shopping case took a number of years to conclude, and the Android case, still ongoing, has been an infringement Google has operated for nearly a decade now. Suffice to say, if we are waiting for the EU to stop AMP, the Internet will be almost entirely AMP-based before the EU forces them to stop. Similarly, in the US, by the time Microsoft lost it's antitrust case, Microsoft's dominance in a lot of ways was already cemented, and in those ways, still is. (While obviously the mobile shift has cut them out, almost every desktop PC in every business on the planet still runs Windows.)
    - fchristant 9y ago
      Agree with all of that, indeed it is a longshot. This leaves us pretty much with the 'awareness' option. I'm not hopeful. Even if you're lucky to have a person in your organization that morally objects to AMP, that person will likely still do the commercially most attractive thing when enough pressure is applied.
gcb0 9y ago
You can add a controversy to the new controversy presented in the article, because even that conditional speed improvement only happens if you ignore the rest of the environment. Meaning, it will be significant if the user is arriving from google search and only focused on browsing. If the user has GPS consuming 3G data, or some other app they care about, and only did a quick google search to confirm something, now the GPS or other app data will be severely limited while the browser download all that crap about some 20 different sites the user will never ever visit. I personally disable preloading on everything, because waiting 3s for a page to show up is a very fine tradeoff to control what my device is downloading and when.
- benjiweber 9y ago
  How does one deactivate the amp preloading?
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    Use a different search engine.
    - robin_reala 9y ago
      Or use encrypted.google.com (for the time being at least). Although I’d definitely recommend using a different search engine as a general rule of thumb.
ddmd1 9y ago
Google can't "simply preload resources of non-AMP pages". Using a CDN means they can get more consistent load times and avoid the inevitable privacy concerns that come with loading 3rd party content the user may never actually click on.
- JoshMnem 9y ago
  Being forced to load everything you read via Google is worse for privacy. There are already plenty of solutions for blocking 3rd party scripts, like Privacy Badger and umatrix.
  - ddmd1 9y ago
    Google already has your IP; it's their page. Preloading resources from it's own CDN doesn't tell them anything they don't already know. Preloading resources from someone else's domain would.
    - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
      They could CDN people's non-AMP static content for this purpose though. It's not like their search engine isn't caching a lot of it already anyways.
      - ddmd1 9y ago
        That's true. I don't see any reason why they couldn't cache non-amp content with a combination of checking for speed benchmarks and schema markup. When you think about it that way, it seems like they are more concerned with controlling the user experience than they are with speed improvements.
      - jsnell 9y ago
        Just how do you imagine they'd "CDN people's non-AMP content"? There's no mechanism by which they could tell the browser to load nytimes.com but to replace the URLs of random resources with different ones. They'd need to host the actual page on Google.com. And after solving all the problems that doing this introduces, you've pretty much got AMP already.
adamrezich 9y ago
Where can I find a good explanation of what "AMP Email" and the controversy surrounding it are? I was hoping this article would detail it because I've seen buzz about it recently
- dmitriid 9y ago
  The top comment has the links: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16455593 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16455593
walterbell 9y ago
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-cases-00 https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-yasskin-webpackage-use-cas... 2018 Chrome demo at AMP event: 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/
kzrdude 9y ago
Side note, install this extension to make medium pages readable by removing the useless top and bottom bars: https://github.com/thebaer/MMRA https://github.com/thebaer/MMRA
- ino 9y ago
  Better yet, use reader mode in firefox/safari. Or stop visiting medium until they stop these user hostile practices.
  - kzrdude 9y ago
    Too many are using Medium. This recent HN posted link for example: https://blog.jupyter.org/jupyterlab-is-ready-for-users-5a6f039b8906 https://blog.jupyter.org/jupyterlab-is-ready-for-users-5a6f0... My protest is to talk about this issue in this HN thread, and to just install the extension so that the sites start to "just work".
2aa07e2 9y ago
I see AMP as a marketing opportunity for a cheap SEO. If more visitors come to my client's or boss's website and get familiar with it, it's a win situation for me as the programmer/maintainer of the said website. More users don't equal increased ad revenue with AMP. If ads are not a thing you are selling, you are probably losing free attention if you aren't already exploiting AMP.
jsnell 9y ago
> If Google would have a genuine interest in speeding up the whole web on mobile, it could simply preload resources of non-AMP pages as well. ... but they've been doing exactly that for ages. Originally with link rel=prefetch, and later with ever more elaborate schemes which I think culminated with this: https://plus.google.com/+IlyaGrigorik/posts/ahSpGgohSDo https://plus.google.com/+IlyaGrigorik/posts/ahSpGgohSDo But prefetching based on giving hints to the browser has a bunch of problems. The most obvious one is the one hinted at here: you can have either something ineffective, or something that's effective but complex and not supported across all browsers. > Not doing this is a strong hint that another agenda is at work, to say the least. The sinister agenda of wanting things to actually work well.
- ec109685 9y ago
  Yes, exactly. They (Google, others) cannot instantly load arbitrary websites because those sites would have access to the google.com domain in an unsafe manner. That is why AMP is “different” than other HTML. It is a safe way to allow Google, Twitter, Bing, Yahoo Japan and others to cache pages and preload/prerender them in the background before the user clicks.
  - Too 9y ago
    If Google had genuine interest in just speeding up page loads after search they would let the client prefetch the page (amp or not) straight from the original domain instead of their own cdn.
    - ec109685 9y ago
      That would mean the third party website would get traffic without the user having clicked on a link, creating a privacy issue.
  - fchristant 9y ago
    We have to differentiate between prefetching from search and prefetching from the actual page being opened. Google CAN preload arbitrary websites. They fully load your website, JS included, when they index it. As for the security problem when on google.com, they could still preload the HTML, CSS, webfonts, do all the DNS/HTTPS overhead, all of which would be safe to do, save those first few seconds, and create a level playing field.
hvass 9y ago
"Something only Google is capable of, because it is the only entity in the world controlling the most important information portal: search." How is Google the only search engine? A different one is literally a click away. This just doesn't pass as an argument.
- kuschku 9y ago
  I have a website. How can I get all my visitors from a search engine other than google with "literally a click"? I can’t. 95% of my visitors will come from Google. As result, I’ll have to accept whatever demands Google makes.
hdra 9y ago
Only thing I can't figure out is why is anyone buying into it in the first place? Has the publishers not learned anything from Facebook taking their content and readers hostage? Sure, it gives you traffic boost in the beginning, but sooner or later it will force you to play by their rules and generate content for them.
- wmf 9y ago
  If I had a choice between going out of business sooner (not using AMP) or going out of business later (getting screwed by AMP one day), I'd choose later.
- Too 9y ago
  It's funny because publishers are otherwise quick to sue Google for their other aggregator and caching features such as Google news and recently the "view image" removal. But with amp they happily bend over.
OnlyRepliesToBS 9y ago
Protocols, weaponized.
akras14 9y ago
Cache is part of AMP spec. What author seems to refer to is only a 2/3 of AMP spec - Subset of HTML and JS library. Since the beginning AMP team was clear that AMP is not very useful without cache. I do agree with all of the concerns raised, but wanted to point this out as to not get sidestepped from the main discussion. https://www.alexkras.com/i-had-lunch-with-google-amp-team/ https://www.alexkras.com/i-had-lunch-with-google-amp-team/ https://www.ampproject.org/learn/overview/ https://www.ampproject.org/learn/overview/
- Sylos 9y ago
  > Since the beginning AMP team was clear that AMP is not very useful without cache. I don't see that at all. Even just calling it a "specification" is misleading in the worst ways. You don't need a spec for caching. Nor do you need a spec to tell you that you shouldn't include a ton of CSS and JS. Nor was it ever the plan of Google to actually see others implement this spec.
  - cromwellian 9y ago
    Actually, the IETF would often issue BCPs to go along with RFCs, because people do need to be told the right way to deploy things in the presence of foot-guns.
- maxyme 9y ago
  But a important point is that you don't get to pick the cache. The website linking to the AMP resource chooses and currently that will always be Google.
sseth 9y ago
AMP is one of a long series of Google's efforts to ensure the web remains competitive with walled gardens and native platforms. Chrome (with the V8 engine), NaCl, SPDY, QUIC, PWA, Dart, Certificate Transparency ... the list goes on and on. Some have succeeded (SPDY became HTTP/2) and some have failed (Dart, NaCl), but it has been consistent at least. Standards cannot become a strait-jacket. In many cases (such as HTTP/2) the standards have come much after the concept was proven. Though Dart and NaCl failed, they triggered improvements in Javascript and also led to WebAssembly. AMP was created as a response to Facebook's Instant Articles. If anyone supports the open web, then it is hard to see how things become better if the web stays stuck as more content moves into walled gardens, or the web remains unusable on mobile phones in large parts of the world. Maybe there is no controversy, because there is no need for one.
- SquareWheel 9y ago
  Well spoken. Most of these standards have been well-designed and open. People are much too quick to assume malice.
- dmitriid 9y ago
  AMP is not open web though. It's Google's own walled garden under the guise of an open web.
  - sseth 9y ago
    As a javascript library it is pretty much as open as React or any other javascript platform. It is the caching where the discussion lies - effectively Google is providing a CDN for AMP pages and I agree this needs some improvements. But these should in the realm of technical discussions rather than looking for conspiracies.
    - dmitriid 9y ago
      AMP is designed by Google, and implemented almost exclusively by Google. It is also used in the most popular search engine in a way that makes AMP feel like it's fast. Meanwhile: - it's not fast without Google's overpowered cache/CDN (that no one has a chance to replicate) - it's not even valid HTML - it's entire design and development is governed exclusively by Google, with no external input, and all external input is discarded and discouraged. See top comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16455593 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16455593 The fact that it lives on GitHub doesn't make it open.
eadmund 9y ago
As an aside, I truly dislike lazy loading. If it's really that important to perceived page speed, isn't it something that the browsers should be implementing, rather than everyone and his brother breaking HTML and require full JavaScript execution in order to display images?
- dictum 9y ago
  Blink may get built-in support for lazy loaded images: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msg/blink-dev/czmmZUd4Vww/1-H6j-zdAwAJ https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msg/blink-dev/czm... I'm not excited about it. I can't remember a single time a page with lazy-loaded images felt snappier. It seems very dependent on latency to the host serving the images. Most pages also don't account for content shifting when images haven't loaded yet.
lucio 9y ago
>The term “open source” is meaningless if the thing that is open source is harmful. A note on "harmful" as an adjective: It depends on the speaker. any open source project aiming to bypass the Great Firewall of China is "harmful", according to the Communist Party.
julienfr112 9y ago
Would it be possible to use amp just for your landing pages from google, and take advantage of instant loading, and then, from within the amp served page, surreptitiously move to you own preload accelerated site ?

247 points by josephscott 9y ago

We were discussing with the AMP project tech lead over on GitHub trying to suss out details about governance and the like, and it's even scarier than we thought when it came to AMP4Email: Gmail is implementing AMP in email "the way they want to", and AMP Project is just deciding whether or not they want to support it/publish a 'standard'. I strongly recommend this for reading: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13597 https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13597 (locked, sadly) and the original AMP4Email issue has a fair bit as well: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13457 https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13457 (only for discussion of email). Unfortunately, there are lots of people talking about how bad AMP is, and why, but nobody yet has suggested how we do anything to stop it.

mulmen 9y ago
I think the best thing to do is just be the kind of online citizen you want to see. It may be small but it is something you can do yourself. I will be looking for a way to move my online identity away from Google to something I control more directly. I am also going to try replacing my social media activity with email. The web is already decentralized, we just need to use it.
- pasbesoin 9y ago
  I just had to think a bit in the opposite direction, with respect to email. Archiving some correspondence from other contexts into it. There's a very handy tool for the archiving I'm interested in. But... under U.S. law, online email storage over X... (I forget the exact count, something over 100 days) days old, is open to examination without a warrant. Not that I've anything particular to hide. But moving my personal correspondence in that direction? I may spin up a an email server under my own sub-net, just to make use of this tool and capture its output. But I'm strongly disinclined to put it on a publicly facing email server.
  - mulmen 9y ago
    The 100 day warrantless examination is an interesting point. Are you suggesting the government doesn't have access to your correspondence on other platforms? You can at least run your own email server.
    - pasbesoin 9y ago
      It depends on the platform, and on ongoing developments in law, regulation, and third-party cooperation (one big way U.S. governments get around their own restrictions is by soliciting (often, paid) data from third parties not bound by such restrictions). Anyway, they may well have this data. Some other data, more likely not. And, even where they may have -- or have access to, this data, retention periods may be significantly shorter. At least, the retention periods that aren't shrouded in secrecy in e.g. a large campus in the middle of Utah. Not email, but more and more social/communications platforms are offering to archive your data in your Google Drive account. Now, maybe with a privately held passphrase to AES encryption, some might consider that ok. But that is not what these services are offering. For the majority of people, "Who cares?" And there is value to keeping your life free of unnecessary friction. But, more and more of this stuff is getting supeonaed in divorce cases, employment disputes, etc., etc. Though, I suppose if you maintain private access to the messages, and don't share them, you are still a candidate for contempt of court. Anyway, I'm not interested in accumulating more of my social life into a data store that, here in the U.S., has less constraints against third-party (here, meaning particularly, government) access.
      - mulmen 9y ago
        Ok but what is the alternative for online communication?
        pasbesoin 9y ago
        Well, I like the idea of end-to-end encryption, combined with storage/archiving on equipment under my own control. Email seems fine, if it's your own server and you can keep it secure. Including, secure from some legal argument that they can knock on your door or the data center's and just have a look at whatever they want. There was a fellow in the UK who used assymmetric keys to encrypt all his inbound email, holding it on the server in encrypted form where the paired key was not on the server but rather available only to his email client. Then, you have the problem of security in transit. That email doesn't offer, inherently. And most of your correspondents won't use PGP/GPG nor SMIME. I just had another friend start using WhatsApp. Is it really secure? I don't know. At least, she'll use it. WhatsApp offers to archive your correspondence to Google Drive. I haven't turned that on. I've tried brining up Signal with a few friends, but they won't give it the time of day. (Unlike the Washington, DC crowd, who now appear to be flocking to it in minor degree.) The tool I might use is for SMS/MMS. It used to also offer to archive WhatsApp conversations, but that's been discontinued. Umm... https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.zegoggles.smssync/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.zegoggles.smssync/ It's also on Play. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zegoggles.smssync&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zegoggles.... So yeah, this isn't any "big security context". Just my personal stuff. But the default is to put the messages into Gmail. On the one hand, actually convenient. On the other... just, no. I have a bootlooped Nexus 5x with a bunch of SMS/MMS I never backed up. Including, I now realize, from a friendship that's ended. I'd kind of like to have some of those. So, I'd like to be pro-active with regard to the next phone that's going to crap out on me. ---- P.S. In short, I think I basically agree with you. Decentralized, and under one's own control. It's just that: Email doesn't secure the transport, and many people won't secure their messages before transport. If it's not your own email server, under your control including perhaps physical, law in the U.S. with respect to email designates older messages as quasi-abandoned and "up for grabs". And I forgot to mention the many posts/comments I've been reading here, about how more and more difficult it's becoming to run your own email server, not just in terms of securing it but also because more and more email providers are shit-canning any emails that don't appear to be blessed by their counterparts. Anyway, I'm not promoting the idea that I have some particularly good answer. Rather, just food for thought.
- robin_reala 9y ago
  I closed my G Suite account today because of Google’s announcement of AMP for Email. Luckily I didn’t have a huge Google presence in the first place beyond email which is easily IMAPed over to another server. Takeout allowed me to extract the rest: my docs as ODF, YouTube subs as RSS and contacts as ICS. If anyone’s interested I wrote up my investigation into potential replacement mail services: http://www.robinwhittleton.com/2018/02/18/dropping-g-suite/ http://www.robinwhittleton.com/2018/02/18/dropping-g-suite/ . In the end I went with Runbox, will see how they perform but I’m happy so far.
  - PuffinBlue 9y ago
    Be sure to look at Zoho.eu too. I think it means all your criteria. They have a dedicated EU service now. I use them and RunBox.
  - watchdogtimer 9y ago
    Another option is simply sign up for a shared hosting account. You'd get all of the features you're looking for and more for equal or less money.
  - tombrossman 9y ago
    > In the end I went with Runbox, will see how they perform but I’m happy so far. I tried Runbox back in 2013 after a fair amount of research and they looked great. After signing up, they sent a confirmation email with all my account info with user-name and password in clear text. I cancelled immediately after seeing this, but I wonder if they are still doing it? I ended up switching to Fastmail, which I still use and highly recommend.
    - robin_reala 9y ago
      I didn’t get that this time at least. It’s worth pointing out that while that’s not great, if they send the password before encrypting it for saving in the database and only send it internally to their own mail server then there’s little security risk. But it’s not best practise as it trains users to expect it from other sites.
- jadedhacker 9y ago
  You're right, being the kind of citizen you want to be is undeniable a good thing, but it's also undeniably useless. It individualizes a collective problem, thereby being an ineffective solution. The only way to resist power is with collective action that substantially challenges it.
  - mulmen 9y ago
    I disagree with your defeatist message and I consider it harmful if spread. Individual action is the foundation of our entire social system. It is not "useless" by any measure. I don't want to use AMP in email so I'm not going to. It's just that easy. What are you doing and what do you suggest the rest of us do? Is voting with our wallets not a thing any longer?
    - k_sh 9y ago
      Jumping in under here to highlight your first point: collective action is, literally, a large set of coordinated individual actions.
      - jadedhacker 9y ago
        That's true but the key word is coordinated. Without coordinated action, we're back at individual action. Coordinated action might be protests, boycotts, etc. Usually there are one or more _institutions_, that is a cohesive group of people, backing and advancing the interests of the group. This is a very powerful model. A familiar example is the NRA. It's not a political party, but it advances the interests of its members relentlessly. Institutions of the left include things like Planned Parenthood. Often, there are issue advocacy organizations that spring up when corporations are doing bad things. Often the strategy is to do things that impact the corporation financially, which short of legal threats is basically the only thing they understand. Anything short of that can be brushed off with rationalizations by various powerful stakeholders within the corporation. Basically, the point I'm trying to make is that individual action is essential, but not sufficient to make a difference when it counts.
- mr_spothawk 9y ago
  I've been very pleased with the integration of Fastmail (calendar/notes/contacts/mail) with iOS & OSX along with DDG I find myself very well taken care of, and I can always type in Google if I need to (2 times a day?).
dmitriid 9y ago
Another issue that raises the same questions is closed and locked: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13623 https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13623 From the issue: > I think that the conversation itself is important and I'm always available on the internets. cramforce is https://twitter.com/cramforce https://twitter.com/cramforce
- dmitriid 9y ago
  I'm also kinda trying to keep the issue alive here: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13600 https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13600
paulddraper 9y ago
I think we have to participate. It claims to be an open standard; we should participate (or try to participate) in the open standard. The problems AMP solves are real. They will be solved one way or another. I'm hopeful they can be solved in an HTMLite sort of way, not a whatever-Google-does sort of way. So let's think about how to improve AMP, change AMP, evolve AMP, until it becomes something else and something better than even its creators thought. Destroy it from the the inside. EDIT: I know AMP has been terribly approached, and it might be nice if it just disappeared. I'm not claiming otherwise. But it's not going to disappear the same way proprietary LiveScript didn't disappear. I don't want to just scream at walls; we've been trying that.
- mulmen 9y ago
  The best way to improve AMP is to drag it out behind the wood shed and shoot it. People just need to get better at making mobile web pages.
  - paulddraper 9y ago
    I'm not saying you're wrong. But I will say I think your wood shed idea won't work. (Though I am very open to hearing more about it's implementation.)
    - mulmen 9y ago
      Yeah I don't think that's realistic either but validating Google by participating in their selfish initiative isn't going to do anyone any favors. Where you can oppose the adoption of AMP and work on improving the rest of the ecosystem so that AMP has fewer compelling applications.
- JoshMnem 9y ago
  AMP isn't truly "open" technology. You can't even discuss its problems on Github without getting the conversation shut down. AMP is an insidious threat the the open WWW itself. It doesn't solve problems that can't be solved in better ways.
- 9y ago
tankenmate 9y ago
Actually I did suggest something to stop it; return a 501 for any email that contains an application/amp+html part (even if it has other MIME parts). Doing this means the sender will have to change their behaviour not the receiver.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  This is really the only way to reject AMP4Email: Refuse to allow it, so that companies wanting to reach their customers can't implement it. However, it's unlikely large mail providers would choose to do this, I can't imagine Microsoft or Yahoo taking such a stand. My own provider FastMail, has said they of course, can't promise they won't support AMP4Email since compatibility is a major goal of theirs, and I can't fault them for that. (And I significantly appreciate the contribution their blog has made to the discussion on the topic.) I'd love if I had the option to opt into behavior like this though, at least on a personal level. But if only a few percent of users (or more than likely, a fraction of a percent) are rejecting the mail, it won't dissuade anyone. Companies will pick up AMP4Email so they can push dynamic advertising directly in people's inboxes.
  - tankenmate 9y ago
    If you run Amavis you can add a MIME type to the $banned_filename_re in a conf file (on debian based derivatives you'll normally find that in /etc/amavis/conf.d/20-debian_defaults). qr'^application/amp+html$'i, is what I use. If you want to put it in a separate file (such as a local config file) then you can just push(@$banned_filename_re,qr'^application/amp+html$'i);
    - rav 9y ago
      Isn't the plus sign a special character in Perl regexes? That is, wouldn't you need to use this instead: qr'^application/amp\+html$'i,
      - tankenmate 9y ago
        You're right, thanks! I still forget sometimes the differences between BRE, SRE, and ERE (mostly due to vim defaulting one thing and perl the other).
IlPeach 9y ago
I don't even think AMP is the problem. It feels more like an symptom. So the question really goes as: what's the actual problem? To keep it very short, it really does feel like to be around how the ad revenue works on the web. But maybe I'm just mistaken and I'm missing some pieces of the puzzle.
- Waterluvian 9y ago
  I think you're right that it's a symptom. Take a perfectly fine system like email and, from a profitability perspective, see a problem and an opportunity.
- hyder_m29 9y ago
  I don't think there's a problem. From what I gather, websites simply adopt AMP for the preferential treatment Google gives AMP pages. It's an SEO-hack.
- spc476 9y ago
  I think the problem is Google. Between Page Rank, QUIC, HTTP/2.0 and AMP, Google is pretty much now dictating the terms of the Internet. For instance, how much longer before Google only accepts email from the "Big Players?" (or drastically lowers the performance/acceptance of email from smaller sites?)
alsetmusic 9y ago
> Unfortunately, there are lots of people talking about how bad AMP is, and why, but nobody yet has suggested how we do anything to stop it. I don’t follow amp links. Then again, I’m satisfied not signing up for twitter, or even loading their site as an outsider to get context when people link to tweets. I also killed my fb account about six months after registering (seven years ago). I clearly accept trade offs that don’t appeal to some. Others have mentioned switching to ddg to withdraw support from google. I will probably test the waters with that in the future. It’s not as though we are held hostage in the fashion that many are beholden to ISPs.
rstephenson2 9y ago
How about we create client-side plugins for each of the major platforms that people can use to detect the AMP mime-type and automatically mark as spam? Email reputation is a huge concern for senders and if there were enough people using the plugin it would poison the entire thing and may deter senders from using AMP entirely. Now, for the web AMP I have no idea...
cromwellian 9y ago
The real problem is, no one has proposed an alternative solution that solves the same problems. Either people claim it's not a problem (slow loading mobile sites driving people away from the web and onto mobile), or people claim it'll just fix itself because everywhere will just make fast pages if they're incentivized to (penalized SEO, users leaving their sites to use Facebook/Apple News) But that has been tried, and it didn't work, and you had people desperately blocking all JS, or going to native apps. My suggestion is, if you don't want people to use AMP, provide an alternative Web framework that provides similar performance, show in a side-to-side demo you can meet the same performance, take it to the W3C or IETF getting Mozilla to push it. No one on a crappy 3g connection really cares about the nuances of the politics here, they don't care bout Web vs native, they care only that their phone seems slow as molasses. If there is no Web solution, then you're going to see native apps with proprietary formats, in essence, non-standard RSS readers. And honestly, I really don't want to download the WashingtonPost, NYT, or Verge App to read articles less painfully. AMP is just JS using the Web Components spec, and some tools, the purveyors of JS frameworks like Vue, Ember, or various Bootstrap-like templates, could ship their own competing proposal. The way standards used to work on the internet is rough consensus and running code. People would propose multiple specs and implement them, working groups would evaluate the various solutions, and the best proposals would be folded in. Provide some competition for AMP and maybe there will be a different outcome. Google shipped NaCL in Chrome, and Asm.js defeated it. Google shipped SPDY, and it won and became HTTP/2. Less talk and politics, more shipping code.
- dmitriid 9y ago
  Have you even read the article? The only reason AMP is perceived as better than anything out there is because Google aggressively preloads it. At best it's not better than anything else out there. Solutions to slow loading pages are well known and have nothing to do with AMP or "other web frameworks". Even Google themselves lay out the solutions: https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/rules https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/rules. Nowhere does it say AMP. And if you bothered to read the article, you'd see that Google's own tools consider Google's own AMP to be bad and non-performant. > Less talk and politics, more shipping code. That's exactly how and why we ended up with AMP.
devgutt 9y ago
The solution is not in the websites, but in search itself. Search needs to be broken down. One centralized search, once good, now is really dangerous for the open web.
fchristant 9y ago
hi, I'm the author of the article. I have no idea how to stop it. Bad press doesn't seem to matter, as this has been around for years. One longshot I could think of is reporting it to the EU as anti-competitive behavior. In the case of exclusive AMP preloading on a dominant market (search), it's not that far fetched.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  As much as I'm really glad the EU is taking a stand on this, they're also taking too long. The shopping case took a number of years to conclude, and the Android case, still ongoing, has been an infringement Google has operated for nearly a decade now. Suffice to say, if we are waiting for the EU to stop AMP, the Internet will be almost entirely AMP-based before the EU forces them to stop. Similarly, in the US, by the time Microsoft lost it's antitrust case, Microsoft's dominance in a lot of ways was already cemented, and in those ways, still is. (While obviously the mobile shift has cut them out, almost every desktop PC in every business on the planet still runs Windows.)
  - fchristant 9y ago
    Agree with all of that, indeed it is a longshot. This leaves us pretty much with the 'awareness' option. I'm not hopeful. Even if you're lucky to have a person in your organization that morally objects to AMP, that person will likely still do the commercially most attractive thing when enough pressure is applied.

gcb0 9y ago

You can add a controversy to the new controversy presented in the article, because even that conditional speed improvement only happens if you ignore the rest of the environment. Meaning, it will be significant if the user is arriving from google search and only focused on browsing. If the user has GPS consuming 3G data, or some other app they care about, and only did a quick google search to confirm something, now the GPS or other app data will be severely limited while the browser download all that crap about some 20 different sites the user will never ever visit. I personally disable preloading on everything, because waiting 3s for a page to show up is a very fine tradeoff to control what my device is downloading and when.

benjiweber 9y ago
How does one deactivate the amp preloading?
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  Use a different search engine.
  - robin_reala 9y ago
    Or use encrypted.google.com (for the time being at least). Although I’d definitely recommend using a different search engine as a general rule of thumb.

ddmd1 9y ago

Google can't "simply preload resources of non-AMP pages". Using a CDN means they can get more consistent load times and avoid the inevitable privacy concerns that come with loading 3rd party content the user may never actually click on.

JoshMnem 9y ago
Being forced to load everything you read via Google is worse for privacy. There are already plenty of solutions for blocking 3rd party scripts, like Privacy Badger and umatrix.
- ddmd1 9y ago
  Google already has your IP; it's their page. Preloading resources from it's own CDN doesn't tell them anything they don't already know. Preloading resources from someone else's domain would.
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    They could CDN people's non-AMP static content for this purpose though. It's not like their search engine isn't caching a lot of it already anyways.
    - ddmd1 9y ago
      That's true. I don't see any reason why they couldn't cache non-amp content with a combination of checking for speed benchmarks and schema markup. When you think about it that way, it seems like they are more concerned with controlling the user experience than they are with speed improvements.
    - jsnell 9y ago
      Just how do you imagine they'd "CDN people's non-AMP content"? There's no mechanism by which they could tell the browser to load nytimes.com but to replace the URLs of random resources with different ones. They'd need to host the actual page on Google.com. And after solving all the problems that doing this introduces, you've pretty much got AMP already.

adamrezich 9y ago

Where can I find a good explanation of what "AMP Email" and the controversy surrounding it are? I was hoping this article would detail it because I've seen buzz about it recently

dmitriid 9y ago
The top comment has the links: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16455593 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16455593

walterbell 9y ago

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-cases-00 https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-yasskin-webpackage-use-cas... 2018 Chrome demo at AMP event: 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/

kzrdude 9y ago

Side note, install this extension to make medium pages readable by removing the useless top and bottom bars: https://github.com/thebaer/MMRA https://github.com/thebaer/MMRA

ino 9y ago
Better yet, use reader mode in firefox/safari. Or stop visiting medium until they stop these user hostile practices.
- kzrdude 9y ago
  Too many are using Medium. This recent HN posted link for example: https://blog.jupyter.org/jupyterlab-is-ready-for-users-5a6f039b8906 https://blog.jupyter.org/jupyterlab-is-ready-for-users-5a6f0... My protest is to talk about this issue in this HN thread, and to just install the extension so that the sites start to "just work".

2aa07e2 9y ago

I see AMP as a marketing opportunity for a cheap SEO. If more visitors come to my client's or boss's website and get familiar with it, it's a win situation for me as the programmer/maintainer of the said website. More users don't equal increased ad revenue with AMP. If ads are not a thing you are selling, you are probably losing free attention if you aren't already exploiting AMP.

jsnell 9y ago

> If Google would have a genuine interest in speeding up the whole web on mobile, it could simply preload resources of non-AMP pages as well. ... but they've been doing exactly that for ages. Originally with link rel=prefetch, and later with ever more elaborate schemes which I think culminated with this: https://plus.google.com/+IlyaGrigorik/posts/ahSpGgohSDo https://plus.google.com/+IlyaGrigorik/posts/ahSpGgohSDo But prefetching based on giving hints to the browser has a bunch of problems. The most obvious one is the one hinted at here: you can have either something ineffective, or something that's effective but complex and not supported across all browsers. > Not doing this is a strong hint that another agenda is at work, to say the least. The sinister agenda of wanting things to actually work well.

ec109685 9y ago
Yes, exactly. They (Google, others) cannot instantly load arbitrary websites because those sites would have access to the google.com domain in an unsafe manner. That is why AMP is “different” than other HTML. It is a safe way to allow Google, Twitter, Bing, Yahoo Japan and others to cache pages and preload/prerender them in the background before the user clicks.
- Too 9y ago
  If Google had genuine interest in just speeding up page loads after search they would let the client prefetch the page (amp or not) straight from the original domain instead of their own cdn.
  - ec109685 9y ago
    That would mean the third party website would get traffic without the user having clicked on a link, creating a privacy issue.
- fchristant 9y ago
  We have to differentiate between prefetching from search and prefetching from the actual page being opened. Google CAN preload arbitrary websites. They fully load your website, JS included, when they index it. As for the security problem when on google.com, they could still preload the HTML, CSS, webfonts, do all the DNS/HTTPS overhead, all of which would be safe to do, save those first few seconds, and create a level playing field.

hvass 9y ago

"Something only Google is capable of, because it is the only entity in the world controlling the most important information portal: search." How is Google the only search engine? A different one is literally a click away. This just doesn't pass as an argument.

kuschku 9y ago
I have a website. How can I get all my visitors from a search engine other than google with "literally a click"? I can’t. 95% of my visitors will come from Google. As result, I’ll have to accept whatever demands Google makes.

hdra 9y ago

Only thing I can't figure out is why is anyone buying into it in the first place? Has the publishers not learned anything from Facebook taking their content and readers hostage? Sure, it gives you traffic boost in the beginning, but sooner or later it will force you to play by their rules and generate content for them.

wmf 9y ago
If I had a choice between going out of business sooner (not using AMP) or going out of business later (getting screwed by AMP one day), I'd choose later.
Too 9y ago
It's funny because publishers are otherwise quick to sue Google for their other aggregator and caching features such as Google news and recently the "view image" removal. But with amp they happily bend over.

OnlyRepliesToBS 9y ago

Protocols, weaponized.

akras14 9y ago

Cache is part of AMP spec. What author seems to refer to is only a 2/3 of AMP spec - Subset of HTML and JS library. Since the beginning AMP team was clear that AMP is not very useful without cache. I do agree with all of the concerns raised, but wanted to point this out as to not get sidestepped from the main discussion. https://www.alexkras.com/i-had-lunch-with-google-amp-team/ https://www.alexkras.com/i-had-lunch-with-google-amp-team/ https://www.ampproject.org/learn/overview/ https://www.ampproject.org/learn/overview/

Sylos 9y ago
> Since the beginning AMP team was clear that AMP is not very useful without cache. I don't see that at all. Even just calling it a "specification" is misleading in the worst ways. You don't need a spec for caching. Nor do you need a spec to tell you that you shouldn't include a ton of CSS and JS. Nor was it ever the plan of Google to actually see others implement this spec.
- cromwellian 9y ago
  Actually, the IETF would often issue BCPs to go along with RFCs, because people do need to be told the right way to deploy things in the presence of foot-guns.
maxyme 9y ago
But a important point is that you don't get to pick the cache. The website linking to the AMP resource chooses and currently that will always be Google.

sseth 9y ago

AMP is one of a long series of Google's efforts to ensure the web remains competitive with walled gardens and native platforms. Chrome (with the V8 engine), NaCl, SPDY, QUIC, PWA, Dart, Certificate Transparency ... the list goes on and on. Some have succeeded (SPDY became HTTP/2) and some have failed (Dart, NaCl), but it has been consistent at least. Standards cannot become a strait-jacket. In many cases (such as HTTP/2) the standards have come much after the concept was proven. Though Dart and NaCl failed, they triggered improvements in Javascript and also led to WebAssembly. AMP was created as a response to Facebook's Instant Articles. If anyone supports the open web, then it is hard to see how things become better if the web stays stuck as more content moves into walled gardens, or the web remains unusable on mobile phones in large parts of the world. Maybe there is no controversy, because there is no need for one.

SquareWheel 9y ago
Well spoken. Most of these standards have been well-designed and open. People are much too quick to assume malice.
dmitriid 9y ago
AMP is not open web though. It's Google's own walled garden under the guise of an open web.
- sseth 9y ago
  As a javascript library it is pretty much as open as React or any other javascript platform. It is the caching where the discussion lies - effectively Google is providing a CDN for AMP pages and I agree this needs some improvements. But these should in the realm of technical discussions rather than looking for conspiracies.
  - dmitriid 9y ago
    AMP is designed by Google, and implemented almost exclusively by Google. It is also used in the most popular search engine in a way that makes AMP feel like it's fast. Meanwhile: - it's not fast without Google's overpowered cache/CDN (that no one has a chance to replicate) - it's not even valid HTML - it's entire design and development is governed exclusively by Google, with no external input, and all external input is discarded and discouraged. See top comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16455593 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16455593 The fact that it lives on GitHub doesn't make it open.

eadmund 9y ago

As an aside, I truly dislike lazy loading. If it's really that important to perceived page speed, isn't it something that the browsers should be implementing, rather than everyone and his brother breaking HTML and require full JavaScript execution in order to display images?

dictum 9y ago
Blink may get built-in support for lazy loaded images: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msg/blink-dev/czmmZUd4Vww/1-H6j-zdAwAJ https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msg/blink-dev/czm... I'm not excited about it. I can't remember a single time a page with lazy-loaded images felt snappier. It seems very dependent on latency to the host serving the images. Most pages also don't account for content shifting when images haven't loaded yet.

lucio 9y ago

>The term “open source” is meaningless if the thing that is open source is harmful. A note on "harmful" as an adjective: It depends on the speaker. any open source project aiming to bypass the Great Firewall of China is "harmful", according to the Communist Party.

julienfr112 9y ago

Would it be possible to use amp just for your landing pages from google, and take advantage of instant loading, and then, from within the amp served page, surreptitiously move to you own preload accelerated site ?