The reason for AMP is surveillance capitalism. If you absolutely, positively believe you have to track your users, writing simple web pages is not an option.

Your choice is either the status quo (pull in lots of third-party cruft), or having a fast-loading page where Google runs the tracking and advertising infrastructure.

> Google runs the tracking and advertising infrastructure

Oh, is that what this is all about? AMP caching is a mechanism to extend Google's lock-in on user tracking. Smart, in an evil sort of way.

Seems a little unlikely, given that Google Analytics is already on 50-60% of the Internet and many mobile apps. Analytics is a much more effective tracking mechanism than AMP.

Also unlikely because AMP supports many other trackers as well (https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/extended/amp-analy...).

The docs explain that "AMP analytics is specifically designed to measure once and report to many". Google's not trying to drive out other players, they're making sure they run the table.

This way they see every request, and learn a lot about their rivals.

Note also that the AMP ad spec warns that there are major changes to come.

https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/extended/amp-ad.ht...

My point elsewhere in this thread is that Google already knows all about their rivals. They're already seeing every HTTP request via Analytics, DoubleClick, Chrome, etc. They're already seeing which of their competitors are in use on which pages via the crawl. While I didn't know of any project to join & analyze this data while I was at Google (indeed, joining log sources required high-up approval because of the privacy implications), doing so would be technically trivial. They certainly don't need to launch a whole new product to get it.

I take your point.

I also believe the stated reasons for the project—to make the mobile web faster–are genuine. I believe that is the sincere motivation of many of the engineers working on it.

But the ultimate purpose of this project is to preserve the status quo around ads and tracking. Bloat has made the current situation on mobile devices untenable, and people are turning to blockers as a solution. AMP is a way to get rid of the bloat without getting rid of the surveillance. Google bets (correctly, in my opinion) that people won't care about being monitored if the performance problems go away.

Controlling the platform that does this will be useful to Google in the long run. For example, Google will be able to blacklist ad networks that don't meet their specifications. And Google can be sure theirs will always be the fastest game in town.

I think this is a completely unfair characterization of AMP.

AMP's speedup doesn't come purely from blocking tracker JS, AMP acts like a framework, like any other, to allow people to leverage best practices for fast rendering, managing all resource loading asynchronously, preventing relayouts during rendering, etc. Most frontend developers, especially at many small publishers, simply don't adhere to good HTML/CSS/JS practices.

If the future is a future where everyone runs blockers, then you get some of the benefits, you also likely break legitimate websites as we have already seen, and you make the blocker vendors themselves into surveillance platforms that sell analytics and extract profit from those who want to punch holes in the blocker. Who do you trust more, Google or AdBlock, Inc? But if the future instead, is that people don't even use Web browsers to read web sites, but used silo'ed Facebook or Apple readers, then how does that benefit anyone? Prior to AMP, the mobile web itself was facing a crisis of bloat.

AMP allows publishing to stay federated and work in browsers, delivering performance that makes it less likely people will leave the Web. I don't see how it's any different than say, Twitter Bootstrap in that regard. If this effort gets people to trim down their mobile pages in order to get better search ranking, by drawing attention to it, we may finally get some traction on an issue that's gone mostly under the radar.

It is in Google's best interest to ensure the open web continues to be viable, as Google Search won't even exist if there is no mobile web to index and everything is published on Facebook or iTunes. Google's overall goal over the years has been to increase web usage, as it's core service relies on it. I compare the Web to logging a forest. You need to keep planting trees and be a good caretaker, else the forest may die out. Many other good projects have been released purely for improvement purposes (e.g. Pagespeed Insights).

But regardless, Google still gets to track it because it goes through their CDN.

I have to imagine that it's more better accurate to get raw numbers at the transfer point rather than browser-reported ones. This also allows them to get stats for no-js browsers, too.

Google Analytics is supported by AMP.[1]

[1]: https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/extended/amp-analy...

Right, but my point is that between Google Analytics, Chrome, and Doubleclick, Google is already tracking basically every pageview on the Internet. There's no need to introduce yet another product to accomplish this.

I think a far more likely explanation is to take Google's statement that they want to accelerate the mobile web at face value. When people view pages faster, they view more of them, which in turn means that they search more, they click on more ads, and Google makes more money. This makes far more sense to me as a direct revenue play than as a surveillance/tracking play.

I think a lot of it is a response to Facebook's instant articles too. They were beginning to build up a story where the fastest version of the Web is via the Facebook app, not the browser and not search. It doesn't take a huge amount more before that story becomes a threat to search.

Oh, absolutely. This is 99% about keeping users inside of Google's walled garden (reserving 1% because cramforce seems like a good guy and genuinely interested in giving mobile users a faster, lighter-weight experience).

80% of my browsing is in a browser that has had doubleclick blocked for years.

Wait, THAT'S why people want to use AMP? I set up AMP on my personal site for a couple weeks because I thought there was an SEO benefit (I didn't see any, so I removed it -- lowering page weight by something like 7x).

I had no idea that the reason it seemed pointless was because it was for ad infrastructure.

Funnily enough the AMP version of my page is larger and takes longer to load than the non-amp version. And ironically I don't even get that little "amp" bolt symbol because it's a software product page and not a recipe, news post or blog post (there's only a handful of categories that are amp enabled).

I think I'm going to remove the AMP page, too. It offers nothing to me and is actually worse for my visitors than the normal responsive page.

Same here. My blog is (unsurprisingly) text-based, so the 40-50kb JS file was almost all of the page weight.

Hold on, "accelerated" pages mean "add 45KB of data"?

You need to add [this js file](https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0.js) that is near to 45KB. I have just uploaded an AMP version for my site and it felt a little bit ridiculous... I made a simpler version (with no js and limited css), changed `<img>` for `<amp-img>` and added this js. It would load even faster without this js!!

Advertisers (as a whole) have a veto on what advertising-driven websites can do since they write the checks. So I think the idea is that it's a compromise that users, websites that depend on ad revenue, and advertisers will all accept, since they all get something they want. If any of them are too unhappy then the new standard won't succeed.

This. It's a CDN based on Google replacing the thicket of tracking companies.

It's completely optional to run any Google stuff on AMP pages.

What you wrote is technically true. We could build crazy fast pages without any AMP-ing. However high profiles sites don't do that and there's a reason for it. I think when revenue is considered, there's a lot more department at at news companies involved: There's the Ad people ( add 2-3 external services ) there's the online marketing team ( add 10 more tracking tools ) then the UX guys have 2-3 tools to play with... The list is probably a lot longer. That's why sites like Mashable used to load 30+ external services (now 13). It all adds extra markup (static and generated), DOM manipulation, network traffic and all sorts of crap that slows pages down.

AMP-ing means saying no to all this by design. I'm not saying this is 'the' perfect solution, but this is a solution to an existing problem. And the problem is not that we somehow forgot how to build fast and light pages.

Actually, it's a result of startupifying every problem we see out there. Oh, AB testing is hard, let's make it easy just by inserting a line of JS to the page. It'll cost $99/month and the clients won't have to develop it themselves.

This is a side effect of the abundance of cheap and easy to use tools.

Probably somebody is already working on how to extract more data from AMP pages :D

You are correct, but the logic here is clearly geared towards pushing sites to rely more on google's standards, rather than actual industry standards.

The problem: We have too much cruft on sites.

The solution: Lets add another layer of cruft!

Ranking smaller/faster sites higher is a better solution, but it doesn't give google that sweet lock-in that they want.

Amp is not a proprietary format so Google lockin doesnt come in. Plus it is a subset of html so all browser should be able to open the amp pages. Sometimes I feel people oppose stuff just because it is from a company that don't like rather than the technical aspects of it.

I didn't say it was proprietary, but it is an unnecessary addon that is already solved by the current standards. I oppose it because it's adding additional cruft, is from a non-trustworthy company, and doesn't address the actual problem.

Looking at how the current mobile web it is necessary. This gives an incentive for the web developers to change. And it gives an open option to facebook closed instant articles. Standards don't change peoples attitudes, money and incentives do. We would still be stuck with ie and its unique html if not for google building chrome and forcing web developers to follow the standards more instead of staying with ie. The developers went where the money was. Same thing is happening with web encryption web developers were not using it till google first speeded it up with SPDY and then started hitting non secured pages with lower ranking in its search. If not for what google has done over the last decade you would be looking at a very different web. Developers like most people don't like change are happy with how things are unless they are forced to change to survive. I might disagree with google on many of its privacy practices etc but can't disregard the fact that many of advancement on the web and internet in general in the last decade have happened because of google forcing people to change or showing how it could be done better.

> Looking at how the current mobile web it is necessary.

I don't see why. We've had mobile pages that worked fine for a long time, they were just normal web-pages, without a lot of cruft.

> This gives an incentive for the web developers to change.

Better ranking practices, would do the same thing.

> And it gives an open option to facebook closed instant articles.

Possibly. I've never used those so I can't say.

> We would still be stuck with ie and its unique html if not for google building chrome and forcing web developers to follow the standards more instead of staying with ie.

uh... did you forget that whole Firefox thing? Google came in on the tail end of that. And they did it, by using standards, not coming up with their own standards that nobody asked for.

> If not for what google has done over the last decade you would be looking at a very different web.

And it would probably be better. Sure, searching through it was harder, but it was way less money-driven, and much more hackable/useful.

> I might disagree with google on many of its privacy practices etc but can't disregard the fact that many of advancement on the web and internet in general in the last decade have happened because of google forcing people to change or showing how it could be done better.

I don't disagree. I'm grateful for Google doing that. But it doesn't mean they get a free pass to make stupid decisions from here on out. This is still the wrong solution to the problem, no matter who is pushing it.

Firefox was able to do nothing until Google chrome adoption forced the wider web to change instead of following Microsoft and ie

> Firefox was able to do nothing until Google chrome adoption forced the wider web to change instead of following Microsoft and ie

Do you have numbers to back that up? I admittedly don't, but I remember sites changing because of FF's popularity. If you can prove it, great, I'll believe you. But I remember it differently

AMP is absolutely a proprietary format.

it's actually: By centralizing we get rid of redundant cruft!

on edit: And we control the leftover cruft!

This is exactly it. The problem has just got out of control and this is _one_ solution. It is also something that could be experimented with. Just AMP a few things and see how it goes.

Is this a mostly US problem?

When visiting non-US sites, they mostly don't seem to load 8 different JS files from different domains, which then load another layer of JS files, repeating for 3 to 8 iterations.

I think it's a global trend. If you can afford cheap data collection then why not do it?

For example ghostery indicates 8-11 trackers blocked on major Hungarian news portals. I'd guess this is close to an average. Check a DailyMail article ;)

I'm as skeptical of Google and any of their initiatives as the next guy, but I'll tell you what, I clicked the AMP link for a WSJ article (from HN web link, obviously), and it displayed instantly. Very un-modern web.

Fine. But the point is the WSJ should be looking at improving their site instead of using google's offering here. It's laziness otherwise.

It's easy to armchair quarterback and say that. But the reasons and incentives behind web page bloat are complicated, and saying "Just make your page load faster! Just get rid of the ads and trackers!" is about as useful as abstinence-only sex ed. AMP is theoretically a way to have your cake and eat it too: all of the revenue from these ads and trackers, without the bloat. And it's at least somewhat open, compared to Apple News and Facebook Articles. It's not hard to see why publishers would gladly jump on board.

> all of the revenue from these ads and trackers, without the bloat.

That is impossible. AMP is just forcing some changes and using better tech architecture for the rest. There are already slow AMP pages because of all the re-added plugins, trackers, media and ads.

Other sites could easily work on better tech delivery to improve performance without AMP, which now only decreases the amount of resources/time they have to work on their own site.

You're quoting things ... that I did not say.

The WSJ is a large site that gets lots of traffic. I assume they have a competent web team, which knows that long load times on mobile suck and knows how to do performance optimization to some degree. I am willing to bet that whatever low-hanging fruit there was to improve their PLT has already been plucked, and the remaining slowness is the complicated stuff I mentioned earlier.

That's why I think statements like your original comment are unhelpfully reductionist, and my paraphrasing of them was not misleading.

Or..... they could just get rid of the bloat. I'm sorry that so many sites suck at building web-pages, but that's not really my problem. I have no problem un-blocking sites that are respectful, and I often do, but pretending like this is a good thing for users is just silly.

AMP gives WSJ an incentive to serve a faster version. Why would they spend money improving their site - especially a big name like WSJ? Plus, from what I've heard from developers working at new sites, "our pages are faster and use less data" is a hard sell to the people in charge, who are more interested in integrating yet another ad platform.

Exactly this. the AMP badge is a visual indicator that says "we're not going to waste time your time with a slow loading webpage, so click this link over one that doesn't have the AMP badge", which incentivizes faster webpages in a way that wasn't available previously.

most clicks go to sites that are on the top of the search results, therefore prioritizing placement due to pageloading speed should be enough of an incentive to most sites. The AMP badge pretends to be an incentive in this way, but the purpose is to extend google lock in.

"Why would they spend money improving their site - especially a big name like WSJ?"

Wait, what!? They have EVERY incentive to make sure they provide a quality product.

What would that be, out of curiosity? Not asking rhetorically. I would just assume the exact opposite -- they have every incentive to provide a monetized, just passable enough to be consumable experience. The content (and ostensibly the design) is the product, not the load time. Performance seems low on the list.

Note, that this launch is explicitly not a ranking change. Your non-AMP result will continue to be displayed in the same spot.

This is just a frontend change: If there is an AMP version of a URL, link there is instead.

It shows a flag. This is an indication to the user to pick this site over others. Maybe not initially but unless someone proves to me, with data, that this won't affect what users click on I do not believe this won't affect user behavior. This is an indirect ranking.

> This is an indication to the user to pick this site over others.

This is an indication to the user that the site has certain traits (particularly, the UX they experience with AMP sites), and that if they like those traits, they should pick the site over others, and conversely if they dislike those traits, they should favor sites without the indicator over those with it.

> Maybe not initially but unless someone proves to me, with data, that this won't affect what users click on I do not believe this won't affect user behavior.

Obviously it is going to affect user behavior.

> This is an indirect ranking.

No, its information (the same as providing, e.g., [PDF] notations), not "indirect ranking". How it affects behavior, like a file-format flag, is dependent on the value (positive or negative) the user ascribes to the trait it provides notice of.

> This is an indication to the user that the site has certain traits (particularly, the UX they experience with AMP sites), and that if they like those traits, they should pick the site over others, and conversely if they dislike those traits, they should favor sites without the indicator over those with it.

You can make a website load like AMP without going through AMP. This is not an indication of a UX trait, this is an indication of using Google's technology and nothing more.

If you have Website A using AMP and Website B not using AMP but able to load in the same way, the Google search is going to show a label next to Website A and not Website B. Do you feel that this is fair? Or another way to force operators to now generate an AMP version of their website? Because I see this as the latter.

> No, its information (the same as providing, e.g., [PDF] notations), not "indirect ranking". How it affects behavior, like a file-format flag, is dependent on the value (positive or negative) the user ascribes to the trait it provides notice of.

Ranking determines where a website shows up and affects user behavior by users choosing the higher ranked websites. This has the same behavior without reordering things. I would call that a form of ranking but this is just splitting hairs; we're saying the same things.

Is that behavior not eventually used to influence ranking? If users continue to click AMP results more often than non-AMP I'm pretty sure the google algorithm will start favoring AMP.

> If users continue to click AMP results more often than non-AMP I'm pretty sure the google algorithm will start favoring AMP.

Perhaps, but, by the same token then, if users find AMP UX to be a bad tradeoff, and tend to click AMP results less often than non-AMP, the algorithm will start to penalize AMP.

dude, get real. if google really wanted to just be helpful to the users they could just put some kind open-source, investigable metric of web page load speed. or full front-page load payload size.

if the flag is google-service-specific, it's not "just information"

> if the flag is google-service-specific

Its only "Google service" in that Google runs an AMP cache service the same as anyone else could; its open source project with open governance that manages its own open spec.

Agreed.

Anecdotal, but my ability to not link to and share AMP'ed results has already caused me to avoid clicking on AMP'ed results.

Google has broken the web.

Are they going to replace DNS with AOL keywords in Chrome next?

On mobile, at least Safari iOS, all the AMP results are at the very top. I can't even see the first non-AMP result unless I'm in portrait.

This is a different feature unrelated to the launch today. It doesn't always show on top, but often will because the sites posting AMP content tend to rank well.

> We originally had web standards for a reason, now we're doing this non-standard stuff.

Web standards have always been a mishmash of competing standards. Eventually one spec will win out and that will be the next standard.

Not entirely true.

Pretty much all the major browsers implemented websql, which then never made it into a standard as there were no competing implementations [0]. Nice while it lasted.

0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_SQL_Database

Can you cite some specific examples?

Do you mean gopher, nntp?

JavaScript is a good example. It wasn't the only web scripting language available, there was JScript and Java Applets and VBScript. JavaScript won and now it's ubiquitous.

And for an example of co-existence of competing languages, see javascript triggering flash/actionscript (e.g. for clipboard access) and vice-versa (e.g. for DOM access).

Both are somewhat dated examples, that is pre-HTML5.

JScript is simply Microsoft's name for its JavaScript implementation. Presumably to avoid Sun's ire.

I agree with your JScript and VBScript answers, but not Java applets.

The entire history of HTML up to and including HTML5. :-)

I was gonna say, i think of all the arguments one can make, this is pretty much the least viable :)

Once the web became mass-market, standards pretty much became a complete mishmash in every area.

XHTML vs HTML?

Something like this had been on Google's wishlist for a long time. Google news stirred up the news industry way back and Rupert Murdoch took a big stake in fighting against it, rallying other publishers. Google also bought the wire licenses so it was free to display a lot of the breaking news directly but had to play a balancing act to avoid irking the publishers.

When FB moved to instant articles, Google moved to amp. It was the opening they had been waiting for, for a long time. AMP was an opportunistic play--a damn good one for Google.

It sucks for publishers but they are forced to play along because of you are always at the mercy of your dumbest competitor.

Users may win but this isn't something publishers want or desire. Building faster pages is easier now than ever. Not as fast as AMP or Facebook Instant but still.

Over time this will lead to commodification because of lack of standards. Bing and others will further lose their lead to AMP. Users will like the new UX. Publishers are confused.

> Bing and others will further lose their lead to AMP.

What's stopping Bing (and others) from using AMP and Microsoft (and others) from building their own AMP caches?

There are many downsides when you don't control the standard. Microsoft is not in the meetings when Google PMs decide the roadmap nor will they have any clout in directing its future or adding its own features. It's merely a consumer.

The main thing about AMP is that it gives consent to the search engines which is why Microsoft is happy to use it. The consent allows search engines to display content without directing users to the publisher platform. And therein lies the rub.

> Microsoft is not in the meetings when Google PMs decide the roadmap

AFAICT [0], the AMP project is an open source project directed by its Tech Lead and Core Committers, which are a self-sustaining group (with Google, Inc. appointing a new Tech Lead in the event there are no Core Committers), even if the initial set was set by Google, and there is no barrier to Microsoft participating as fully as anyone else in that project.

[0] largely, from the project's own governance document on github, https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/GOVERNANCE...

Nothing. Bing has already started using AMP in their results.

> We originally had web standards for a reason, now we're doing this non-standard stuff.

Standards today represent the successful non-standard stuff of yesterday.

"Standards today represent the successful non-standard stuff of yesterday."

Nice way of describing almost every, current standard I can think of. I might quote you on that.

There's also the consideration from the ad network side of things. This gives Google a lot more power in the ecosystem than they had before in theory if lots of people switch to it (which they will, because they don't have much of a choice).

Similarly with Instant Articles--the big players own the ecosystem and can enforce whatever constraints they want if they have enough leverage. In this case, it happens to provide a sizable benefit to end users so publishers and ad networks are really the only ones feeling the pain.

> If I don't the competition will. We originally had web standards for a reason, now we're doing this non-standard stuff.

I suggest you file a complaint here, if you believe you have to use AMP to not get a competitive disadvantage (because that would be unfair influence on the market by Google):

http://ec.europa.eu/competition/contacts/electronic_document...

EDIT: The parent comment complains that the market is unfairly influenced by two large almost-monopolies in their respective markets – so why do I get downvotes for linking the official reference for filing antitrust complaints?

It's a very open and transparent standard that doesn't stop others from adopting or caching it as well. It just so happens that the nature of caching favours big players like Google, but Cloudflare or Bing could offer a cache as well. I fail to see it as some sort of Google ecosystem lock-in.

AMP is also compliant with web standards. It just uses Custom Elements which is a fairly new standard.

While i understand the philosophical grievance, will the AMP tag matter? Personally, when i search without an ad blocker i categorically ignore any 'Ad' result on Google. But will the typical user value AMP pages more heavily? Time will tell, i suppose, but i would be surprised to see a measurable impact on a top 1-3 search result.

AMP is of most use on mobile (possibly the only place it works?) where ad blockers don't normally exist. So, they will likely have an impact there.

I know that I have personally opened search results to AMP pages that I would not normally have opened because I knew the price of doing so would be small. But, then again, I know what the AMP symbol means. How this affects normal users remains to be seen.

For some sites, I seek out the AMP URL explicitly. For example, adding "/amp" to the end of TechCrunch URLs change them from frustrating to usable.

> where ad blockers don't normally exist

curious as to what you mean by that. I definitely have an ad-blocker running on my phone (android)

and iOS provides an official API for adblocking since version 9.

IMHO adblocking is even more relevant on mobile because of latency & data caps.

Is the origin of this any worse than the origin of the blink tag?

http://www.montulli.org/theoriginofthe%3Cblink%3Etag