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I'm no fan of AMP, but: The current choice for google when someone searches for a news story is between linking them to a page that is (a) in an ecosystem unde

I'm no fan of AMP, but: The current choice for google when someone searches for a news story is between linking them to a page that is (a) in an ecosystem under google's control and (b) will load reasonably fast and get fairly straight to the article content, or (a') is completely up to the publisher and (b') may contain any number of redirects, external scripts, full-page ads, pop-ups and overlays, autoplaying sound+video etc. If we had a system that offers (a') + (b), it would blow everything else out of the water. At the moment we just have to pick the least bad option. AMP is obviously aligned to google's business interests, but if you A/B tested the user experience of the AMP and non-AMP versions of many of the news sites out there on mobile, I think you'd see a preference for AMP because the publisher can do less of the stuff aligned with their own business interests. EDIT: I realise that AMP can break many navigation features, but for the "click a link - read a single article - leave again" use case it beats getting interrupted by an "other articles you may enjoy, and by the way sign up to our newsletter!" pop-up halfway through.

tyler33 8y ago
AMP is the monopolistic dream of google, they want all the internet on their servers, and thats not only bad, also it is ilegal
- red_admiral 8y ago
  Google already has a copy of most of the internet on their servers - they're quite open about this if at tech conferences (although they claim to respect robots.txt). I completely agree with you that their monopoly dream is bad - their motto "don't be evil" is starting to sound as ironic as the word "democratic" in some countries' names - but many of the advertising and data-sharing practices on the "open" web are also bad (and sometimes illegal under the GDPR). Choose your poison.
- Cthulhu_ 8y ago
  Not just Google though - Facebook wants it too (going as far as creating their own internet bubble where Facebook is free, the rest isn't), and Apple (with Apple News), and if Microsoft had a more significant internet presence I'm sure they'd be all over it as well. They prefer to dominate the professional world though, also plenty of money to be had.
realusername 8y ago
They could have achieved an AMP standard with just a doctype for it, there's no technological need of Google servers at any point. I understand the business need to privatize the web but there's no technological need for it, all the claims of "we're doing that for making it faster" are just plain wrong, they could have done it differently.

tyler33 8y ago

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

red_admiral 8y ago
Google already has a copy of most of the internet on their servers - they're quite open about this if at tech conferences (although they claim to respect robots.txt). I completely agree with you that their monopoly dream is bad - their motto "don't be evil" is starting to sound as ironic as the word "democratic" in some countries' names - but many of the advertising and data-sharing practices on the "open" web are also bad (and sometimes illegal under the GDPR). Choose your poison.
Cthulhu_ 8y ago
Not just Google though - Facebook wants it too (going as far as creating their own internet bubble where Facebook is free, the rest isn't), and Apple (with Apple News), and if Microsoft had a more significant internet presence I'm sure they'd be all over it as well. They prefer to dominate the professional world though, also plenty of money to be had.

realusername 8y ago

They could have achieved an AMP standard with just a doctype for it, there's no technological need of Google servers at any point. I understand the business need to privatize the web but there's no technological need for it, all the claims of "we're doing that for making it faster" are just plain wrong, they could have done it differently.