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 ;)