Google's AMP has to be one of the best examples of how manipulative Google has become towards developers, users, the world. AMP is presented as "the web on a d

Google's AMP has to be one of the best examples of how manipulative Google has become towards developers, users, the world. AMP is presented as "the web on a diet", and AMP's speed advantage supposedly achieved by its clever and enforced constraints. Protecting us irresponsible web developers from coding slow pages. Sounds believable, sounds good. Problem is, that's not at all the reason AMP is fast. It's fast because as you scroll through Google's search results on mobile, AMP pages are preloaded as you scroll by them. Then you click one and its instantly there, because it was preloaded. Which is something Google does not do for non-AMP pages, for "privacy reasons". Which is quite rich when you force users of a publication to consume it via Google in the case of an AMP page. Anyway, this is why an AMP page has a 3-5s head-start compared to any other non-AMP page. As more and more people notice the blatant lie that is AMP "performance", here comes the next manipulative tactic. They show some vulnerability. "OK OK, maybe this wasn't the proper 'standard' way to do it, but we were in a rush to solve the performance crisis". The performance "crisis" for which there seems little internal Google consensus, as every single fucking of their own products violate best practices or actively contribute to it (Google tag manager), yet never get a ranking penalty, but I digress. This next part is a stroke of genius. What really happened here is that Google failed to fully trick the user. They want the user to believe they are on domain.abc whilst in reality they are on google.com. They tried all kinds of hacky glitchy methods to conceal reality but could never make it water tight. So by admitting to some error and promising to improve their game, they'll now use the standardized approach: signed exchanges. Good guy Google "listened" to criticism by now implementing a standard that allows them to FULLY trick the user, as it's built right into the browser. So they'll be back. So whenever Google tries to sell something as good (speed, web standards), know how full of deceit they are. The other tactic is "open source", as if that means anything. You know what the real disappointment is though? The complete lack of regulation. How on earth can a company that is a monopolist in search, browsers, analytics AND advertising do an obvious power grab like this in the open and just fully get away with it, not a care in the world? We need modernized digital regulation, drastically.