'The Web is Not Google, and Should Not be Just Google': Developers Express Concerns About AMP (ampletter.org)

A group of prominent developers published an open-letter on Tuesday, outlining their deep concerns about Accelerated Mobile Pages, a project by Google that aims to improve user experience of the Web. Google services already dominate the Web, and the scale at which AMP is growing, it could further reinforce Google's dominance of the Web, developers wrote. The letter acknowledges that web pages could be slow at times, but the solutions out there to address them -- AMP, Facebook's Instant Articles, Apple News -- are creating problems of their own, developers say. From the letter: Search engines are in a powerful position to wield influence to solve this problem. However, Google has chosen to create a premium position at the top of their search results (for articles) and a "lightning" icon (for all types of content), which are only accessible to publishers that use a Google-controlled technology, served by Google from their infrastructure, on a Google URL, and placed within a Google controlled user experience. The AMP format is not in itself, a problem, but two aspects of its implementation reinforce the position of Google as a de facto standard platform for content, as Google seeks to drive uptake of AMP with content creators: Content that "opts in" to AMP and the associated hosting within Google's domain is granted preferential search promotion, including (for news articles) a position above all other results. When a user navigates from Google to a piece of content Google has recommended, they are, unwittingly, remaining within Google's ecosystem.

If Google's objective with AMP is indeed to improve user experience on the Web, then we suggest some simple changes that would do that while still allowing the Web to remain dynamic, competitive and consumer-oriented: Instead of granting premium placement in search results only to AMP, provide the same perks to all pages that meet an objective, neutral performance criterion such as Speed Index. Publishers can then use any technical solution of their choice. Do not display third-party content within a Google page unless it is clear to the user that they are looking at a Google product. It is perfectly acceptable for Google to launch a "news reader," but it is not acceptable to display a page that carries only third party branding on what is actually a Google URL, nor to require that third party to use Google's hosting in order to appear in search results. We don't want to stop Google's development of AMP, and these changes do not require that.

Comments

First they came for FTP, then HTTP, then HTTPS...

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> Content that "opts in" to AMP and the associated hosting within Google's domain is granted preferential search promotion

In the web's evolving history, FTP-served content was the first to disappear from search engines, then HTTP-only content (Google dropped priority of these sites years ago) and now its HTTPS. As long as AMP is a patent-free, open standard and (like HTTP and then HTTPS) it's trivial to implement, I have no problem with this.

Web is already broken

[sanf780]

You cannot navigate many webpages without JavaScript enabled. Ghostery is telling me there are over 17 trackers on slashdot. Many of these slow down the initial web page render.

As such, anything that forces web developers to make fast loading pages makes me happier.

Re:Web is already broken

[Desler]

So you hate trackers but are fine with loading pages from the largest analytics tracking company on the web? lolwut?

Re:Web is already broken

[ichimunki]

Abso-fucking-lutely would rather have websites just use Google Analytics over 17 rando shit trackers. With Google I have the ability to go look at how I'm being tracked and there's only one site to block if I want to try to opt out of being tracked. With 17 crap sites plugging garbage in, I'm going to have slow renders, weird errors, and no way in hell of ever figuring out who has a piece of my information pie.

Re:Web is already broken

[ichimunki]

Actually, if Google wants to help, instead of creating a walled garden and special formats, perhaps they could track load times for pages and page load overhead and just weight results based on that data point. That would differentiate Google's results from their competitors without confusing the issue, while also rewarding web sites that take the time to worry about performance.

Re:Web is already broken

[DickBreath]

uMatrix is your friend. I navigate just fine while whitelisting some sites, and blacklisting all ad-related and tracking JavaScript. It's easy to use for any geek on slashdot. But not for granny.

By default uMatrix pretty much only allows 1st party JavaScript which is a good compromise. Then sometimes features don't work. For example sites using Disqust (disgust) for comments. You can then selectively enable that one with a simple click if you want to read comments. Or some sites have videos that require you to enable JavaScript. If you visit a certain site regularly, then you can selectively enable just enough JavaScript for the features you want to work, but no ads or tracking. Then click a save button to remember the selections for this website.

uMatrix also gives you fine control. (hence matrix) The rows are for different sites where html, css, javascript, frames, cookies, media, xhr, and other things come from. The columns are the items I just mentioned. Sometimes I get a site that deceptively says "Something interfered with this website loading". It's an anti-ad blocker thing. On those sites, you disable JavaScript and ONLY JavaScript from the 1st party. But you need to keep the other columns from 1st party, like html, css, etc in order to have any page content.

It's not directly an ad-blocker, but it is basically the most effective ad blocker I think I've seen.

Re:Web is already broken

[DickBreath]

May I add . . . uMatrix also speeds up browsing. Removes ads, some other media, etc. So it lessens the need for AMP.

Re:Web is already broken

[ichimunki]

Gee, just what I wanted to prevent people from tracking me is to have yet another add-on that has access to every web page I visit! Gotta love Ghostery's one-click setup, "Share my analytics and Human Web data to improve Ghostery’s performance." This doesn't make me want to tighten my tinfoil hat at all!

Re:Web is already broken

[viperidaenz]

If you control the devices, install your own CA and issue your own cert for googleapis? HTTPS isn't all mystery and voodoo.

Re:Web is already broken

[ShanghaiBill]

Yes. With Google, I know what they will do with my data. They will use it to place ads for their clients. It is very unlikely that they will sell it to third parties, because that would come at a heavy cost with very little benefit.

For the other trackers, I have no idea what they will do with the information they gather.

Re:Web is already broken

[ichimunki]

I think you're missing my larger point. It's bass-ackwards to be installing a piece of closed-source software with the ability to watch all my browsing in order to protect my privacy.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Meet the

[Anonymous Coward]

new boss.

Same as the old boss.

Re:Frankly, AMP is a godsend.

[Desler]

Mobile news reading is horrible with AMP pages as it breaks things like the Mobile Safari reader functionality. Reading pages with Reader is way better than with shitty AMP and having to deal with website designers that use shitty, unreadable fonts and font sizes.

Re:Frankly, AMP is a godsend.

[Hal_Porter]

Firefox + uBlock origin works pretty well for me on Android. It's faster than Chrome.

Re:Frankly, AMP is a godsend.

[sl3xd]

AMP changed that and forced Facebook to follow suit with the lightning articles, and the mobile news reading experience is *infinitely* better now.

Bullshit on all accounts. Facebook's Instant Articles predated Google's AMP by several months, and Google is the one who was following.

Mobile news is markedly worse with AMP; I've read several accounts where publishers lament that it's slower than their native version.

My first sign that AMP is horribly broken is that every single AMP page I've ever visited all point to "google.com", and the URL bar shows "google.com" regardless of the site I'm actually visiting. Phishers can (and have) conceal pretty much anything behind AMP, and few users would have a clue because they see the lock with "google.com" at the top of their browser.

The next problem with AMP is that you can't turn it off: Google feeds you AMP pages if you use a mobile browser, and you have to load the AMP page first and then click to additional times to get to the non-AMP page.

The alternative is to use a different search engine, which is what a lot of us are doing.

AMP is a bigger problem than anything it was trying to replace.

Re:First they came for FTP, then HTTP, then HTTPS.

[viperidaenz]

Simply building an AMP compatible site isn't enough though. To get the preferential search promotion you need to have Google host it.

Solution in search of a problem

[bradley13]

The web is not slow. There actually is no problem.

Individual sites are slow, because they load ridiculous quantities of scripts and third-party content. They deserve to be slow. Three examples:

- Homepage of an eCommerce site, would like to compete with Amazon: 1.1MB of data, 74 requests, 2.1 seconds load time.

- Homepage of a major newspaper 1.3MB of data, 80 requests, 3.2 seconds load time.

- Homepage of a small eCommerce site that I manage: 130kb of data, 14 requests, 350ms load time. Where's the problem?

tl;dr: It's their own damned fault. If they insist on zillions of trackers, annoying content and huge JS frameworks - well, there's a penalty to be paid.

Re:Frankly, AMP is a godsend.

[drew_kime]

No, thanks. As a user, I would trust Google far more than the shitty media conglomerates and their shitty websites.

Google is a shitty media conglomerate.

You do know that ... right?

I have an idea to speed up the web

[neutrino38]

Let us invent another new binary format, that is self contained (pictures, media, etc) with a rich API.
Each page would be a sigle file that coulb be cached by the browser. Nobody would be able to twick its content once deployed.
Of course we would need to have a specific editor to edit and compile it.

MMmmm and as it will be very fast, let us call it Flash.

Oh and by the way, as I do not expect a native implementation I would suggest to add it as a plugin first.