13 ms·

249. The speed benefits Google marketed were also at least partly a result of Google’s throttling. Google throttles the load time of non-AMP ads by giving them

249. The speed benefits Google marketed were also at least partly a result of Google’s throttling. Google throttles the load time of non-AMP ads by giving them artificial one-second delays in order to give Google AMP a “nice comparative boost.” Throttling non-AMP ads slows down header bidding, which Google then uses to denigrate header bidding for being too slow. “Header Bidding can often increase latency of web pages and create security flaws when executed incorrectly,” Google falsely claimed. Internally, Google employees grappled with “how to [publicly] justify [Google] making something slower.” I’d be seriously ashamed at this point if I was a Google employee assigned to AMP.

onion2k 5y ago
You do have to wonder what impact this will have on the employment prospects of Google engineers in the unlikely event that it all blows up for Google. Having a toxic company on your resume is never a good thing.
- edgyquant 5y ago
  It’s gonna be a long time before having Google on your resume is seen as anything but good
- tjpnz 5y ago
  Not nearly as bad as Facebook.
  - zrail 5y ago
    Is FB on an engineering resume actually bad?
    - VRay 5y ago
      No, any household name megacorp on your resume is a good thing and a golden ticket to any job you want, evil or not
FractalHQ 5y ago
I’m on my phone so I can’t find it now, but I remember an elaborate GitHub or chrome dev thread where users and google devs explored the 1 second delay in depth, and a reason for it relating to an issue where some ads could break or fail to load without the delay. Not sure how legitimate my memory is, but I recall folks on hn defending it at the time.
jsiepkes 5y ago
> I’d be seriously ashamed at this point if I was a Google employee assigned to AMP. "No single raindrop believes it is to blame for the flood." [1] [1] https://despair.com/products/irresponsibility https://despair.com/products/irresponsibility
- robbedpeter 5y ago
  This is why principles are important. Living by a well considered and thoughtful set of beliefs, secular or otherwise, has an impact on the world. Even if things look hopeless, your actions contribute to the way life unfolds for everyone else. Even if things look trivial, not engaging in minor infractions against your beliefs is withholding that single drop from the flood. I won't ever use tiktok, and speak against it to friends and family when questioned. I support the use of Signal and promote basic digital literacy, lending my time to help people learn about encryption and protecting their personal information, even in seemingly trivial things like not playing quiz games on social media. I don't believe in a monolithic big brother spying on individuals, but there is a collective impact of all of those systems, if which Google Amp plays a big part. It normalized the idea that centralizing the gateways to content was a good thing, regardless of Google's intentions. It usurped control of a minor piece of web functionality that gave Google a big competitive advantage. People have been commoditized by getting them to give up private data without understanding what it is they're giving up. At a very basic level, you could look at Facebook - they have 3 billion members and make 30 billion dollars a year - someone's data is worth $10usd per year on average. Similar valuations can be applied to other companies, but Google is getting around $150 billion a year for advertising. If you could assign a weight to people, some would be worth far more than others, and even entirely boring and innocent profiles are damaging to consumers, because they're providing baselines that enable further and more nuanced manipulation. It's such an insidious and subtle injury to society that getting people to even notice litigation like this suit is difficult. Getting them to care, when the attitude of "I've got nothing to hide" is hugely demoralizing to people who do care. Gross anticompetitive actions are a part of the problem, but the reckless use of algorithms that influence exposure to information, its context, and its timing is a huge, hairy deal, but even amongst techies it's hard to communicate why. We are collectively wireheading in a way the majority of humans don't have the knowledge or education to recognize as dangerous. The knock-on effects are sometimes many degrees of separation from any single company's actions or behavior, and there doesn't have to be a human in the loop for the algorithms to poison the future of a society. The agency of individuals is stolen by systems like Amp - a drop in the digital flood that is drowning liberty and sovereignty. It creates a system that gets abused for profit or politics or ideology. It reinforces the arms race in surveillance technology, but a vast majority of people are content with the idea that they have nothing to hide, not realizing that they are choosing to grant control over the information they will be allowed to consume anywhere within the ecosystem they engaged with. FAANG's actions subtly influence the behavior of billions of humans. Innocuous and trite misbehavior on their part gets amplified far beyond what anyone would predict, and we have almost nothing in human history to measure against. These institutions have to be held to a higher standard, and societies all over the world must work to make private information a resource entirely and absolutely controlled by the user.
mrtksn 5y ago
Wow, I feel naive now for defending AMP providing better user experience. As it turns out, Google is evil and I simply did not want to believe it.
- cupcake-unicorn 5y ago
  There were people defending AMP? Everything I've heard about it was backlash
  - mrtksn 5y ago
    AMP does have better experience from the users perspective. The backlash is from the techies only. I assumed that the non-amp websites were slower due to the JS bloat, I still despise what the Web pages has become, however it turns out Google wasn't a honest broker here and instead of providing a tool that helps them and the users, they provided a tool that helps them and harms the users and bullies the website owners. That's evil and drains the last bits of trust I had left for Google.
    - 8note 5y ago
      Amp gives you non logged in versions of websites. Anyone whos usually logged in somewhere is impacted negatively
      - mrtksn 5y ago
        Fair. So far there are three issues pointed out here that I'm not happy with too. To re-cap: 1) Sharing AMP links is weird, feels wrong and Non-AMP links are hard to get 2) Breaks Safari's reader mode 3) Gives sub-par experience for websites that provide better experience when logged in since the AMP version is always the non-logged-in version. None of those are deal-breaker for me because AMP pages come as a search results and fast loading results are very valuable for me when skimming to find the right one. Once I find it, I can switch to the full version(but Google makes it harder and harder. maybe this should be 4.).
dessant 5y ago
They're also pushing for the adoption of Signed HTTP Exchanges, with several Google employees defending the spec here on HN, comparing it to be merely like HTTPS in terms of publishers giving up control over their content. It's clear that Chrome must be separated from Google and Alphabet, nothing else will stop them from trying to colonize the web.
- zebracanevra 5y ago
  equating it to be merely like HTTPS in terms of publishers giving up control over their content. Where did you read that? I was under the impression that SXG is more similar to things like IPFS, where you can have content signed by its origin (or in IPFS, content addressed by its hash). Once that is achieved, any other site (e.g. a CDN like Google or Cloudflare) can cache and serve it securely and with authentication. You can sign whatever content you want with SXG, it isn't limited to AMP.
- deadbunny 5y ago
  > It's clear that Chrome must be separated from Google and Alphabet, nothing else will stop them from trying to colonize the web. Or advocate for open alternatives, use Firefox, and make sure any site you build (or you build at work) work perfectly in non Chrome browsers.
  - dessant 5y ago
    > Or advocate for open alternatives Yes, supporting other browsers is a given, but did you want to say "and advocate"? Advocating for alternatives alone will achieve close to nothing when you are faced with a cartel, regulatory action is desperately needed in this industry.
  - rytcio 5y ago
    The real problem is that Google/Chrome basically run the internet. If Google decides to change some internet standard, Firefox and web developers all follow suite like lemmings. It's like Google has become the authoritative leader in web without any sort of process or watchdog. Aside from getting people off of Chrome, the other need is to get people to stop following Google's leadership on all things web.
pja 5y ago
Good grief. AMP always looked fishy, but to be as blatantly abusive as this? It's indefensible. Google has to be broken up.
google234123 5y ago
“The design of it was discussed in https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/3133 https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/3133. It wasn't done nefariously. AMP prioritizes the page content and verified elements first over non-AMP content (including non-AMP ads).” From an older discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25448718 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25448718
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
In case anyone reading is unaware Google already inserts artificial delay into page loading times, to allow for header bidding. Online advertising proponents would argue this delay is below human perception. But the perceptibility of the wait should be for users, not Google, to decide; it is artifical and undisclosed delay, for the benefit of advertising. If users were told about it and could avoid it, no doubt they would. As we can see, artificial delay can be used as an anticompetitive measure. These tactics, similar to deliberately introduced incompatibilities or performance differences, are old hat. For example, through the 90's, third party software for Windows never ran as smoothly as software issued by Microsoft. It was not the same "user experience". So long as this sort of conduct remains "legal", these companies interpret that as permission to engage in it.
- tomjen3 5y ago
  So much software is too slow today. I don't think developers remember that users will not perceive your software as instant if you don't get the result in 100ms. I cancelled my evernote subscription because it is too slow to start up. If I need to access a note on my phone, I don't want it to take perceived time, because then I have to go through the effort of remembering what I am trying to write. I have switched to Apple notes, which seem to get this.
  - VRay 5y ago
    At two large tech companies I worked for, people loved to throw around the term “blink of an eye!” to justify anything around 100ms “Oh, that’ll load in the blink of an eye! Only as much latency as the blink of an eye!” etc It was damn frustrating to try and explain to these clowns that things look like crap if you pile up 2+ blinks of an eye on top of them. In the case of VR, even one “blink of an eye” is about 10x too much delay
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  > it is artifical and undisclosed delay, for the benefit of advertising So ad blocking makes everything faster!
- 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
beckman466 5y ago
> The speed benefits Google marketed were also at least partly a result of Google’s throttling. Google throttles the load time of non-AMP ads by giving them artificial one-second delays in order to give Google AMP a “nice comparative boost.” wow i love when Silicon Valley literally throws away people's time. imagine the cumulative total time being wasted by this artificial delay...
- eternalban 5y ago
  our time -> their money. our identity -> their money. our whereabouts -> their money. our society ?->?
  - noisy_boy 5y ago
    their business.
magicalist 5y ago
People are being awfully credulous of two sentence fragments quoted in an editorial paragraph. Much of this could certainly be true but my bullshit meter is going off on the level of narrative they're reconstructing in all the non-quoted portions. I dislike AMP because the UX is bad and Google strong armed it in the news carousel anyways instead of focusing on performance for all sites, but this would be a lot more convincing with the source emails entered into the record. edit: and this is just talking about ad content, right? Unless somehow a publisher made their entire page blocked until the page's ads load, throttling the load of ads would just make the ads load slower. And from what cletus quotes in another comment: > To respond to the threat of header bidding, Google created Accelerated Mobile Pages (“AMP”), a framework for developing mobile web pages, and made AMP essentially incompatible with JavaScript and header bidding. Google then used its power in the search market to effectively force publishers into using AMP. Is the claim that ads in AMP pages don't run javascript or do header bidding and so are "fast", but javascript and header bidding isn't inherently slow so Google could have made them faster (and/or not intentionally throttled)? I've never worked much with ads so maybe someone with knowledge of header bidding can comment.
- windexh8er 5y ago
  Bullshit meter? It seems to me this is yet another validation that Google is an ad sales company hell bent on preventing competition, controlling the market and lying to end users and integrators. All of these pieces are adding up - what was conjecture is finally being validated and I, personally, believe that Google is not in it for the good of the customer, but are only in it for a profit. Death to Google by thousands of cuts like this? Game on. I've said it before, sales organizations only base performance on profit. It is the toxin that defines all of this misbehaviour. Nobody "thinks" they're doing anything wrong because it's talked about as benefiting the shareholder. Google isn't immune to this.
  - magicalist 5y ago
    > It seems to me this is yet another validation That's just what I mean. There's a tiny amount of validation and a lot of rhetoric. It would be preferable to be able to see the actual sources they're quoting from.
amelius 5y ago
> Google throttles the load time of non-AMP ads by giving them artificial one-second delays in order to give Google AMP a “nice comparative boost.” That's it. Webmasters should give all visitors with a Chrome user agent a loading penalty of 1 second and a popup saying that the website runs faster on Firefox. I said it before on HN, but the idea was condemned, and I partially agreed, but now it seems (at least to me) a fully justifiable strategy to make users win back power.
- magicalist 5y ago
  > Webmasters should give all visitors with a Chrome user agent a loading penalty of 1 second and a popup saying that the website runs faster on Firefox it's for ads: > Google throttles the load time of non-AMP ads by giving them artificial one-second delays so would need to limit the +1 second for ads to be equivalent, but you could just run "ads" for ad blockers instead :)
  - collinmanderson 5y ago
    More info on 1-second delay when discussed last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25449389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25449389 It started as a 1-second delay for all ads, but then they found a technical way to allow for ads made with AMP to load sooner.
- username190 5y ago
  IMO Action should be taken against Google here, not the average user (about 70% of whom use Chrome). Throttling based on user agent (Firefox, WebKit Safari, etc) would be a bad thing if you ran YouTube and wanted to encourage people to use Chrome - it would likewise be bad if you ran a website like HN. Users have power when they have control - Google is taking that away, and that's why antitrust legislation makes sense. But users lose power when their choice of browser (in a market where there are only 2-3 choices) makes their web experience artificially worse.
  - amelius 5y ago
    Then consider the 1 second delay as an advertisement for consumer power. Google/YouTube annoys users with similar or even longer delays all the time. So I don't think you can see this as an "action against the user", unless you consider all non-user-tracking advertisements as an action against the user. Also, the campaign can stop when Chrome and Firefox reach an equal user-base. So "the user losing freedom of choice of browser" is also not a strong argument. Yes, it's sad that this seems necessary, but you can't fight corporate evilness with just goodwill. In a sense, this is somewhat similar to the paradox of tolerance [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
jeffbee 5y ago
It's sort of amazing how people are boosting this lawsuit up to the front page of HN dozens of times over three days, without really seeming to grasp that it is one side of a civil law suit, and that anyone would be a fool to take a filing like this at face value. It's a little thin on evidence, don't you think? Normally when the attorneys general of Kentucky and South Dakota put their heads together about something, the rest of us point and laugh. But when they put together a document that looks like the top 1000 most-unhinged HN comments from users like `ocdtrekkie`, critical thinking gets thrown under a bus and it's 100% pure credulity.
- Jensson 5y ago
  Newcorp and the other media's anti google campaign has worked flawlessly. Even techies boarded the train and now think Google is worse than Microsoft or Apple. At worst Google is as bad as Microsoft or Apple if all the things the articles accuse them of is true. I don't work for Google nor own Google stocks, but among the things I am afraid of Google using its position to capture a bit too much of the ad-market is among the least of those, and that is ultimately what all these accusations boils down to. User data is for ads, these anti-competitive practices are for ads etc. If ads is the peak of their evil then I'd say they aren't terribly evil. Google's biggest sin was to sit in the way of news media profits, that caused a barrage of articles written by news media companies targeted at them. I'd say that is evidence of news media being evil, not Google being evil.
  - jeffbee 5y ago
    Yep. You'd expect a community like HN to understand that the newspaper industry is a gigantic evil cabal, but I guess we're just not collectively smart enough.
    - IdiocyInAction 5y ago
      I don't think it is necessarily about being "smart" - a story like this simply confirms many biases people have about big, "evil" corporations and even very smart people are prone to confirmation biases. Mind you, I am most certainly sure that Big Tech has tons of shady shit going on, as would any industry of that size, but a politically charged lawsuit championed by a competing industry is not what I would use as proof.
imapeopleperson 5y ago
That’s criminal

onion2k 5y ago

You do have to wonder what impact this will have on the employment prospects of Google engineers in the unlikely event that it all blows up for Google. Having a toxic company on your resume is never a good thing.

edgyquant 5y ago
It’s gonna be a long time before having Google on your resume is seen as anything but good
tjpnz 5y ago
Not nearly as bad as Facebook.
- zrail 5y ago
  Is FB on an engineering resume actually bad?
  - VRay 5y ago
    No, any household name megacorp on your resume is a good thing and a golden ticket to any job you want, evil or not

FractalHQ 5y ago

I’m on my phone so I can’t find it now, but I remember an elaborate GitHub or chrome dev thread where users and google devs explored the 1 second delay in depth, and a reason for it relating to an issue where some ads could break or fail to load without the delay. Not sure how legitimate my memory is, but I recall folks on hn defending it at the time.

jsiepkes 5y ago

> I’d be seriously ashamed at this point if I was a Google employee assigned to AMP. "No single raindrop believes it is to blame for the flood." [1] [1] https://despair.com/products/irresponsibility https://despair.com/products/irresponsibility

robbedpeter 5y ago
This is why principles are important. Living by a well considered and thoughtful set of beliefs, secular or otherwise, has an impact on the world. Even if things look hopeless, your actions contribute to the way life unfolds for everyone else. Even if things look trivial, not engaging in minor infractions against your beliefs is withholding that single drop from the flood. I won't ever use tiktok, and speak against it to friends and family when questioned. I support the use of Signal and promote basic digital literacy, lending my time to help people learn about encryption and protecting their personal information, even in seemingly trivial things like not playing quiz games on social media. I don't believe in a monolithic big brother spying on individuals, but there is a collective impact of all of those systems, if which Google Amp plays a big part. It normalized the idea that centralizing the gateways to content was a good thing, regardless of Google's intentions. It usurped control of a minor piece of web functionality that gave Google a big competitive advantage. People have been commoditized by getting them to give up private data without understanding what it is they're giving up. At a very basic level, you could look at Facebook - they have 3 billion members and make 30 billion dollars a year - someone's data is worth $10usd per year on average. Similar valuations can be applied to other companies, but Google is getting around $150 billion a year for advertising. If you could assign a weight to people, some would be worth far more than others, and even entirely boring and innocent profiles are damaging to consumers, because they're providing baselines that enable further and more nuanced manipulation. It's such an insidious and subtle injury to society that getting people to even notice litigation like this suit is difficult. Getting them to care, when the attitude of "I've got nothing to hide" is hugely demoralizing to people who do care. Gross anticompetitive actions are a part of the problem, but the reckless use of algorithms that influence exposure to information, its context, and its timing is a huge, hairy deal, but even amongst techies it's hard to communicate why. We are collectively wireheading in a way the majority of humans don't have the knowledge or education to recognize as dangerous. The knock-on effects are sometimes many degrees of separation from any single company's actions or behavior, and there doesn't have to be a human in the loop for the algorithms to poison the future of a society. The agency of individuals is stolen by systems like Amp - a drop in the digital flood that is drowning liberty and sovereignty. It creates a system that gets abused for profit or politics or ideology. It reinforces the arms race in surveillance technology, but a vast majority of people are content with the idea that they have nothing to hide, not realizing that they are choosing to grant control over the information they will be allowed to consume anywhere within the ecosystem they engaged with. FAANG's actions subtly influence the behavior of billions of humans. Innocuous and trite misbehavior on their part gets amplified far beyond what anyone would predict, and we have almost nothing in human history to measure against. These institutions have to be held to a higher standard, and societies all over the world must work to make private information a resource entirely and absolutely controlled by the user.

mrtksn 5y ago

Wow, I feel naive now for defending AMP providing better user experience. As it turns out, Google is evil and I simply did not want to believe it.

cupcake-unicorn 5y ago
There were people defending AMP? Everything I've heard about it was backlash
- mrtksn 5y ago
  AMP does have better experience from the users perspective. The backlash is from the techies only. I assumed that the non-amp websites were slower due to the JS bloat, I still despise what the Web pages has become, however it turns out Google wasn't a honest broker here and instead of providing a tool that helps them and the users, they provided a tool that helps them and harms the users and bullies the website owners. That's evil and drains the last bits of trust I had left for Google.
  - 8note 5y ago
    Amp gives you non logged in versions of websites. Anyone whos usually logged in somewhere is impacted negatively
    - mrtksn 5y ago
      Fair. So far there are three issues pointed out here that I'm not happy with too. To re-cap: 1) Sharing AMP links is weird, feels wrong and Non-AMP links are hard to get 2) Breaks Safari's reader mode 3) Gives sub-par experience for websites that provide better experience when logged in since the AMP version is always the non-logged-in version. None of those are deal-breaker for me because AMP pages come as a search results and fast loading results are very valuable for me when skimming to find the right one. Once I find it, I can switch to the full version(but Google makes it harder and harder. maybe this should be 4.).

dessant 5y ago

They're also pushing for the adoption of Signed HTTP Exchanges, with several Google employees defending the spec here on HN, comparing it to be merely like HTTPS in terms of publishers giving up control over their content. It's clear that Chrome must be separated from Google and Alphabet, nothing else will stop them from trying to colonize the web.

zebracanevra 5y ago
equating it to be merely like HTTPS in terms of publishers giving up control over their content. Where did you read that? I was under the impression that SXG is more similar to things like IPFS, where you can have content signed by its origin (or in IPFS, content addressed by its hash). Once that is achieved, any other site (e.g. a CDN like Google or Cloudflare) can cache and serve it securely and with authentication. You can sign whatever content you want with SXG, it isn't limited to AMP.
deadbunny 5y ago
> It's clear that Chrome must be separated from Google and Alphabet, nothing else will stop them from trying to colonize the web. Or advocate for open alternatives, use Firefox, and make sure any site you build (or you build at work) work perfectly in non Chrome browsers.
- dessant 5y ago
  > Or advocate for open alternatives Yes, supporting other browsers is a given, but did you want to say "and advocate"? Advocating for alternatives alone will achieve close to nothing when you are faced with a cartel, regulatory action is desperately needed in this industry.
- rytcio 5y ago
  The real problem is that Google/Chrome basically run the internet. If Google decides to change some internet standard, Firefox and web developers all follow suite like lemmings. It's like Google has become the authoritative leader in web without any sort of process or watchdog. Aside from getting people off of Chrome, the other need is to get people to stop following Google's leadership on all things web.

pja 5y ago

Good grief. AMP always looked fishy, but to be as blatantly abusive as this? It's indefensible. Google has to be broken up.

google234123 5y ago

“The design of it was discussed in https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/3133 https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/3133. It wasn't done nefariously. AMP prioritizes the page content and verified elements first over non-AMP content (including non-AMP ads).” From an older discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25448718 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25448718

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

In case anyone reading is unaware Google already inserts artificial delay into page loading times, to allow for header bidding. Online advertising proponents would argue this delay is below human perception. But the perceptibility of the wait should be for users, not Google, to decide; it is artifical and undisclosed delay, for the benefit of advertising. If users were told about it and could avoid it, no doubt they would. As we can see, artificial delay can be used as an anticompetitive measure. These tactics, similar to deliberately introduced incompatibilities or performance differences, are old hat. For example, through the 90's, third party software for Windows never ran as smoothly as software issued by Microsoft. It was not the same "user experience". So long as this sort of conduct remains "legal", these companies interpret that as permission to engage in it.

tomjen3 5y ago
So much software is too slow today. I don't think developers remember that users will not perceive your software as instant if you don't get the result in 100ms. I cancelled my evernote subscription because it is too slow to start up. If I need to access a note on my phone, I don't want it to take perceived time, because then I have to go through the effort of remembering what I am trying to write. I have switched to Apple notes, which seem to get this.
- VRay 5y ago
  At two large tech companies I worked for, people loved to throw around the term “blink of an eye!” to justify anything around 100ms “Oh, that’ll load in the blink of an eye! Only as much latency as the blink of an eye!” etc It was damn frustrating to try and explain to these clowns that things look like crap if you pile up 2+ blinks of an eye on top of them. In the case of VR, even one “blink of an eye” is about 10x too much delay
matheusmoreira 5y ago
> it is artifical and undisclosed delay, for the benefit of advertising So ad blocking makes everything faster!
5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

beckman466 5y ago

> The speed benefits Google marketed were also at least partly a result of Google’s throttling. Google throttles the load time of non-AMP ads by giving them artificial one-second delays in order to give Google AMP a “nice comparative boost.” wow i love when Silicon Valley literally throws away people's time. imagine the cumulative total time being wasted by this artificial delay...

eternalban 5y ago
our time -> their money. our identity -> their money. our whereabouts -> their money. our society ?->?
- noisy_boy 5y ago
  their business.

magicalist 5y ago

People are being awfully credulous of two sentence fragments quoted in an editorial paragraph. Much of this could certainly be true but my bullshit meter is going off on the level of narrative they're reconstructing in all the non-quoted portions. I dislike AMP because the UX is bad and Google strong armed it in the news carousel anyways instead of focusing on performance for all sites, but this would be a lot more convincing with the source emails entered into the record. edit: and this is just talking about ad content, right? Unless somehow a publisher made their entire page blocked until the page's ads load, throttling the load of ads would just make the ads load slower. And from what cletus quotes in another comment: > To respond to the threat of header bidding, Google created Accelerated Mobile Pages (“AMP”), a framework for developing mobile web pages, and made AMP essentially incompatible with JavaScript and header bidding. Google then used its power in the search market to effectively force publishers into using AMP. Is the claim that ads in AMP pages don't run javascript or do header bidding and so are "fast", but javascript and header bidding isn't inherently slow so Google could have made them faster (and/or not intentionally throttled)? I've never worked much with ads so maybe someone with knowledge of header bidding can comment.

windexh8er 5y ago
Bullshit meter? It seems to me this is yet another validation that Google is an ad sales company hell bent on preventing competition, controlling the market and lying to end users and integrators. All of these pieces are adding up - what was conjecture is finally being validated and I, personally, believe that Google is not in it for the good of the customer, but are only in it for a profit. Death to Google by thousands of cuts like this? Game on. I've said it before, sales organizations only base performance on profit. It is the toxin that defines all of this misbehaviour. Nobody "thinks" they're doing anything wrong because it's talked about as benefiting the shareholder. Google isn't immune to this.
- magicalist 5y ago
  > It seems to me this is yet another validation That's just what I mean. There's a tiny amount of validation and a lot of rhetoric. It would be preferable to be able to see the actual sources they're quoting from.

amelius 5y ago

> Google throttles the load time of non-AMP ads by giving them artificial one-second delays in order to give Google AMP a “nice comparative boost.” That's it. Webmasters should give all visitors with a Chrome user agent a loading penalty of 1 second and a popup saying that the website runs faster on Firefox. I said it before on HN, but the idea was condemned, and I partially agreed, but now it seems (at least to me) a fully justifiable strategy to make users win back power.

magicalist 5y ago
> Webmasters should give all visitors with a Chrome user agent a loading penalty of 1 second and a popup saying that the website runs faster on Firefox it's for ads: > Google throttles the load time of non-AMP ads by giving them artificial one-second delays so would need to limit the +1 second for ads to be equivalent, but you could just run "ads" for ad blockers instead :)
- collinmanderson 5y ago
  More info on 1-second delay when discussed last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25449389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25449389 It started as a 1-second delay for all ads, but then they found a technical way to allow for ads made with AMP to load sooner.
username190 5y ago
IMO Action should be taken against Google here, not the average user (about 70% of whom use Chrome). Throttling based on user agent (Firefox, WebKit Safari, etc) would be a bad thing if you ran YouTube and wanted to encourage people to use Chrome - it would likewise be bad if you ran a website like HN. Users have power when they have control - Google is taking that away, and that's why antitrust legislation makes sense. But users lose power when their choice of browser (in a market where there are only 2-3 choices) makes their web experience artificially worse.
- amelius 5y ago
  Then consider the 1 second delay as an advertisement for consumer power. Google/YouTube annoys users with similar or even longer delays all the time. So I don't think you can see this as an "action against the user", unless you consider all non-user-tracking advertisements as an action against the user. Also, the campaign can stop when Chrome and Firefox reach an equal user-base. So "the user losing freedom of choice of browser" is also not a strong argument. Yes, it's sad that this seems necessary, but you can't fight corporate evilness with just goodwill. In a sense, this is somewhat similar to the paradox of tolerance [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

jeffbee 5y ago

It's sort of amazing how people are boosting this lawsuit up to the front page of HN dozens of times over three days, without really seeming to grasp that it is one side of a civil law suit, and that anyone would be a fool to take a filing like this at face value. It's a little thin on evidence, don't you think? Normally when the attorneys general of Kentucky and South Dakota put their heads together about something, the rest of us point and laugh. But when they put together a document that looks like the top 1000 most-unhinged HN comments from users like `ocdtrekkie`, critical thinking gets thrown under a bus and it's 100% pure credulity.

Jensson 5y ago
Newcorp and the other media's anti google campaign has worked flawlessly. Even techies boarded the train and now think Google is worse than Microsoft or Apple. At worst Google is as bad as Microsoft or Apple if all the things the articles accuse them of is true. I don't work for Google nor own Google stocks, but among the things I am afraid of Google using its position to capture a bit too much of the ad-market is among the least of those, and that is ultimately what all these accusations boils down to. User data is for ads, these anti-competitive practices are for ads etc. If ads is the peak of their evil then I'd say they aren't terribly evil. Google's biggest sin was to sit in the way of news media profits, that caused a barrage of articles written by news media companies targeted at them. I'd say that is evidence of news media being evil, not Google being evil.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  Yep. You'd expect a community like HN to understand that the newspaper industry is a gigantic evil cabal, but I guess we're just not collectively smart enough.
  - IdiocyInAction 5y ago
    I don't think it is necessarily about being "smart" - a story like this simply confirms many biases people have about big, "evil" corporations and even very smart people are prone to confirmation biases. Mind you, I am most certainly sure that Big Tech has tons of shady shit going on, as would any industry of that size, but a politically charged lawsuit championed by a competing industry is not what I would use as proof.

imapeopleperson 5y ago

That’s criminal