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I've had a few people call me a shill for Google on these threads since I'm a Xoogler/Ex-Facebooker (it's literally in my profile) so I'm going to quote myself

by cletus 5y ago

I've had a few people call me a shill for Google on these threads since I'm a Xoogler/Ex-Facebooker (it's literally in my profile) so I'm going to quote myself here [1] from 7 months ago: > Giving advantageous ranking (including, but not limited to, showing AMP content in Top Stories) is the very definition of using your market power in one area (search) to force publishers to adopt something else you created. > For a company that is (or should be) very careful about attracting antitrust attention from the US/EU, this seems completely reckless. I've always hated AMP. Publishers are forced into it by the ranking advantages. Users have no opt out. It breaks the mobile UI (eg pinch to zoom). It's horrible. There was a time when the idea wasn't terrible because a lot of websites were terrible and slow on mobile, somewhat ironically in no small part due to all the ad libraries they loaded. But it was clear who benefitted the most here was actually Google. Now I always suspected that this was the result of some org trying to increase their impact. If it turns out as the suit alleges: > 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. Boy oh boy is that a problem. And again I'm going to say I called it. The other damning part: > 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. Just... wow. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26561769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26561769

Aaargh20318 5y ago
> There was a time when the idea wasn't terrible because a lot of websites were terrible and slow on mobile Yes, and that time was the early 2000's, and the solution was not AMP but WAP[1]. Google effectively re-invented WAP about 15 years after it was no longer necessary. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol
- phatfish 5y ago
  I had completely forgotten about WAP, but i remember using a WAP browser of some sort on an old Sybmian Nokia now i think about it. Before add-ons worked with Firefox mobile (and I could install ublock), browsing the web on a phone was awful. If i remember it was around the time that AMP launched in 2015 that Firefox mobile got add-on support. So there was certainly a problem more recently that 15 years ago. The adverts on news sites were so bad that AMP was able to make mobile pages clearly better from a UX point of view. But that was largely a problem of Googles own making, and their "generous" fix was obviously stacked in their favour. All users needed was the ability to install an ad-blocker on their mobile browser, but of course Google was never going to allow that for Chrome.

by cletus 5y ago

Aaargh20318 5y ago

> There was a time when the idea wasn't terrible because a lot of websites were terrible and slow on mobile Yes, and that time was the early 2000's, and the solution was not AMP but WAP[1]. Google effectively re-invented WAP about 15 years after it was no longer necessary. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol

phatfish 5y ago
I had completely forgotten about WAP, but i remember using a WAP browser of some sort on an old Sybmian Nokia now i think about it. Before add-ons worked with Firefox mobile (and I could install ublock), browsing the web on a phone was awful. If i remember it was around the time that AMP launched in 2015 that Firefox mobile got add-on support. So there was certainly a problem more recently that 15 years ago. The adverts on news sites were so bad that AMP was able to make mobile pages clearly better from a UX point of view. But that was largely a problem of Googles own making, and their "generous" fix was obviously stacked in their favour. All users needed was the ability to install an ad-blocker on their mobile browser, but of course Google was never going to allow that for Chrome.