People have been railing against Google's Amp on HN for years, and I think I finally figured out what it's for.
It's Google way of combatting phone apps.
If all of the world's information — especially current news and similar information — moves from the open web into apps, then Google can no longer crawl, index, or scrape that information for its own use. The rise of the mobile phone app is a threat to Google on so many levels from ad revenue to data for training its AIs.
So Google comes up with Amp to convince publishers to keep their content on the open web, where it can be collated, indexed, and otherwise used by Google for Google's services like search and those search result cards that keep people from visiting the content creators.
Google's explicit carrot in all this is the user benefit of page loading speed. Google's implicit carrot in all of this is page rank. But Google's real motivation is to have all of that information available to itself.
Can you imagine what would happen if content from even one of the big providers was no longer visible to Google? New York Times, WaPo, or even Medium? It would create a huge hole in a number of Google products and services, make its search results look even weaker than they already are, and cause people to look for search alternatives.
That's my theory, anyway.
I think the main issue is limited AMPCache providers and inability for the publisher to choose their own AMPCache providers. Which is being exploited the two search engines.
AMP project by itself is open-source and it explicitly states 'Other companies may build their own AMP cache as well'.[1] There are only 2 AMP Cache providers - Google, Bing. Further, 'As a publisher, you don't choose an AMP Cache, it's actually the platform that links to your content that chooses the AMP Cache (if any) to use.'[2]
Say, if Cloudflare provides a AMPCache and if the site publisher can choose their own Cache provider this can be resolved effectively as AMP by design itself is easy for a laymen to create high performance websites; of course there is no excuse for hiding URLs.
[1]https://amp.dev/support/faq/overview/
[2]https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/learn/amp...
The whole AMP thing seems anti-competitive and hostile to the open web.
It's a really bad look on Google's part to be pushing this.
IMO the core point of the article is false.
> To be blunt, this is a really dangerous pattern: Google serves NYTimes’ controlled content on a Google domain.
No, "Google serves NYTimes' controlled content" is an oxymoron. Google controls the content that is served, and that's all your browser is verifying. Google could very well make the NYTimes content on there display something else and your browser wouldn't show a warning. NYTimes could do nothing about that.
I disagree that this pattern is dangerous. While Google taking over serving the world's content is hardly a thing to celebrate, at least we're seeing that it's doing so here.
The shenanigans Google been doing to the url bar is super hostile.
Trying to copy the domain of a url without the protocol just infuriates me.
One of the main reasons sites use AMP (listed in top sites in serps) will not require AMP soon.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/28/21272543/google-search-re...
It's wrong to trust the URL bar. For example, this search [1] has as top link an ad that boasts "google.com", and it really is! And if you click on it, you'll end up on a google.com site, which nominally helps with printers, but in reality it's a tech support scam.
So much of the distrust here is that google wants to be everything: to host their content and publisher content and user content; to broker ads and recommend links; to run their software on your computer and phone, to store your data on their servers. They serve too many masters.
New York Times and all the other publishers don't have to participate in this crap. It's shameful that they cede authority over their content so easily in exchange for a vuage promise of more visibility. There are so many better ways.
This is the question I always had and confused myself over.
In addition to this, I previously stumbled upon a few situations where I visited an AMP site to read an article and I noted down the site name in my mind. A few days later I tried to visit that site and when I put the site name in the address bar in hopes of getting helped by autocomplete, guess what?! It was nowhere to be found.
This has been all over HN since amp was released, and this is a two paragraph article with no new info or opinion.
Time to share this post one more time:
How to fight back against Google AMP https://markosaric.com/google-amp/
And the original thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21712733
AMP seems like a solution in search of a problem. Are people really having trouble with loading speed in 2020? I travel to remote areas in third world countries regularly for work and still don't really have problems loading pages with mobile data.
Even if it didn't have all of the problems associated with it I just don't get the point. I don't need Google to repackage a website with less useability. It's frequently not even faster.
Google has already effectively become the address bar - people go to google.com to go to any other website. Now they are just solidifying it so that you don't even remember the url of a website after a while.
I despise AMP for the entirely selfish and pedestrian reason that it hijacks my phone's browser bar and won't let me access tab management until I scroll all the way back up to the top of the page.
Totally disagree with this drama whoever is putting on for the sake of being in the group of 'anti-google so I am looked as if I am so smart and so know it all and google is trying to control everyone and nobody sees it except me now I am writing a post to tell the world how different I am'
As a user, before learning computer knowledge, I am so thankful and amazed by those AMP pages, because they are really fast! And I barely look at this URL thing to care for security which is huge deal to those conspiracy queens, because as non-tech user I don't know a heck about URL, all I care is how fast a page is presented to me.
So, no, the problem is only you, yes, you can just use a dramatic title just because you are so bored with your life to cause a scene, you are only embracing yourself and bring some noise to this already chaotic world, please, go find yourself something to do instead of trying so hard to be internet famous. Thank you.
> Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) are lightweight pages designed to load quickly on mobile devices. AMP-compliant pages use a subset of HTML with a few extensions. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), is a very accessible framework for creating fast-loading mobile web pages.
That itself sounds awesome and something we should promote. The other part of AMP is of course that it's served through Google's servers. While their global edge caches probably bring the speed up I think that's less important.
I other words: AMP as a framework to force users to build light-weight pages without bloat is a good thing. Google's control is a bad thing.
I think many of the comments here make it a borderline topic where there's either all or nothing. I want to see a more nuanced discussion on what the possible alternatives and solutions are instead of just "Google bad, AMP bad".
Does it actually matter where you are, or is that just an implementation detail?
One interpretation is that Google is changing the URL bar from "where" to "who", which may be the more relevant information for most users. Signed exchanges are an interesting way to achieve that.
Internet before shows the real URL. Plain and simple.
I remembered long time ago when Digg tried to do this and the internet revolted.
I guess times have changed.
AMP is a lot like how I was browsing the web on my phone before the iPhone came out. Opera Mini’s servers would proxy every single page I visited and fetch and pre-compile it before sending it compressed to my phone. It was way more performant than trying to render the page natively on my crappy phone. (That’s why the iPhone was so unique, it was the first phone that could natively render websites really well). Sure, there were a lot less security and privacy concerns back then, but I think the majority of users simply don’t care as long as it works.
If The New York Times is unhappy with this use of their branding, it seems to me that they could easily claim trademark infringement.
They could argue that Google is using The New York Times's branding and domain name to make it look like this content is controlled and provided by The New York Times, when in fact it isn't, and that an average person (“idiot in a hurry”) could be deceived.
If The New York Times willingly gives Google permission (or The New York Times willingly abets Google's monopoly position), then I guess Google can do whatever they like.
Remember when Google's mantra was "Don't be evil" ???
I have my own proxy filtering all my desktop and mobile traffic, anything 'AMP' is filtered spot on. Sometimes nothing shows up, sometimes the original server responds after a few seconds. I'd rather not see the page at all than play this game.
Regardless of your feelings on AMP, the premise of this article is wrong. Security standards and expectations are still exactly the same in this model. You see "google.com" in the address bar and trust that Google is serving you the right content.
What happened to The Internet? Honestly.
Google should can do this stuff if they like...on their own network in their own ecosystem.
Insane that they got rich from hyperlinks and now want to fiddle with the so others can't.
AMP is the main reason I switched to DuckDuckGo from Google. Webpage rendering often used to break on iOS, in particular scrolling where the page would just go blank.
Google amp links are so annoying too when you want to send a link to other people of something you've searched for. One of the main reasoms Inuse duckduckgo.
What will all those submissive publishers do once Google decides to monetize AMP by injecting their own ads with 0 revenue for the publisher?
I noticed this two days ago and it was the final straw that made me switch to DuckDuckGo on all my devices.
This is absolutely the reason that Google is no longer my default search engine on mobile.
AMP is the consequence of HTML and CSS being awful at performance. I'm not sure why the underlying problem hasn't been addressed. Rending text and images on a page shouldn't require a secondary cache and an amp rendering framework on top of ton of css and layers of javascript. It's text and images.
I wonder how many phishing sites are masquerading as google from google
Is anyone aware of any Firefox/brave plugins that strip Google amp links?
Grabby and wrong, and most of the value created is for Google.
I don't get the point of article.
I know Google wants browsers to lie to the user about the website they're visiting. But the article screenshot is a case where that's not happening, it's displaying the real URL.
You are at home in front of you screen. Thank me later.
Quis hic locus, quae regio, quae mundi plaga?
Haven't news sites pushed law suits over this?
I don't like AMP and I wish we just fixed the problems it is designed to handle at the root cause.
it's 2020 and ya'll are still using Google?!?! DDG all the way!
You're on a website stealing content from NYT.
A: You are on Google. There's no confusion.
Google sucks, i'm going golfing.
With the utmost respect to you and the other commenters here, when I see positivity about the abstract, hypothetical technical merits of something with a long history of, in practice, being part of an extremely controversial power play it reminds me a lot of the comments I see promoting a widely installed piece of process management software — one which a lot of people don’t really want, whose subtle changes to layers of abstraction introduce new and unexpected bugs that can only be fixed by further coupling, and which can also be reasonably described as a single entity politically maneuvering itself to bring order to the chaos at the expense of living in, for want of a better term, a dictatorship.
Well at least under Google AMP, the pages loaded on time.
The only one who wins when media outlets integrate AMP, is google. Stop the madness, for the love of an open internet. You gain nothing, you are just giving google control over content as the new norm.
You're on Google, the 21st century version of AOL
I think the author has got it all wrong.
You are supposed to trust Google.
And when your browser says 'Google' - you know it is all good.
If you think this is creepy, wait until you see Menlo Security. That's security for everyone except the user.
AMP is disliked by privileged people who have never experienced how truly awful browsing the web with a bad internet connection can be.
"Does google rig the system to squash its rivals and hurt us?"
Well, this is one kind of modern skepticism I particularly like: Does gravity kill if one jumps off a cliff? Is a sphere round? Is it really bad if we give up our freedom? Who are we to think for ourselves?
When questions like this are asked, the damage is already done. And it seems like it's already beyond repair.
Users executing their code are the product. Giving those people the independence of knowing who they are talking to is contrary to their business model.
Image AMP? No URL for You! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23322730
Yes this has been a big issue for a very long time now. Google wants to push a release where it will display the hostname of the amp site even if the content is being served from google.com[1].
Mozilla (and Apple) are strictly against it and thank god for Mozilla. If Google had a bigger market share this would already be something we would have been living with. I'm sure there are better sources for this, but here is the first result:
https://9to5google.com/2019/04/18/apple-mozilla-google-amp-s...