I disagree with your defeatist message and I consider it harmful if spread. Individual action is the foundation of our entire social system. It is not "useless" by any measure.

I don't want to use AMP in email so I'm not going to. It's just that easy.

What are you doing and what do you suggest the rest of us do? Is voting with our wallets not a thing any longer?

And how productive do you think "voting with our wallets" can be for a product we don't pay for from a company with more money than all of us combined?

You're "voting with your data," which for a company like Google is essentially the same thing. If you don't hand them data, they can't monetize it.

Google auotmatically collects data on you the moment you visit and site with Google Analytics or a +1 button or when using Google Ads. Or using youtube.

While it's certainly not totally impossible to vote with your data, you should remember that you are the product for google. The customers are advertisers. Not you.

Some of us do/did pay for gmail. Also you could stop using Google all together as I have for this exact reason. (Specifically no way to disable AMP). I’ve been using bing/duckduckgo for search and icloud for email for a few years now. The only reason Google gets away with any of this crap is how many people refuse to switch to another service so yes voting with your wallet/wall clock will get results.

You're right, we should just use Google for everything because they have money. All is lost. Thanks for opening my eyes, you have really made a positive impact.

/s

On a serious note I don't like the negativity in your comment and I don't think there is anything insightful about it. I believe the free market is based on individual actions. I will continue to choose services based on how well they serve my needs.

That's the problem with Google being the default search for almost all browsers and almost all phones: The entire tech industry could unite against Google, and Google still has literally billions of users who don't know better.

Probably at least slightly more productive that literally voting in actual elections.

If I had a solution I'd be telling you about it I assure you. I'm just saying that vote with your wallet and put your faith in the market is also not a solution in this case.

Jumping in under here to highlight your first point: collective action is, literally, a large set of coordinated individual actions.

That's true but the key word is coordinated. Without coordinated action, we're back at individual action. Coordinated action might be protests, boycotts, etc. Usually there are one or more _institutions_, that is a cohesive group of people, backing and advancing the interests of the group. This is a very powerful model.

A familiar example is the NRA. It's not a political party, but it advances the interests of its members relentlessly. Institutions of the left include things like Planned Parenthood. Often, there are issue advocacy organizations that spring up when corporations are doing bad things. Often the strategy is to do things that impact the corporation financially, which short of legal threats is basically the only thing they understand. Anything short of that can be brushed off with rationalizations by various powerful stakeholders within the corporation.

Basically, the point I'm trying to make is that individual action is essential, but not sufficient to make a difference when it counts.

funny thing that, I went to the their membership page for the first time today because I wanted to know how to express my individual support. I'm not an owner, and I will likely get a membership ... because it's an advocacy I care about.

People may not like a compromise approach, but I've switched to using standard IMAP-based mail readers with gmail. If more people did that instead of using the gmail app and web site, Google would maybe see that AMP'd email wouldn't reach a large number of their customers.

Then again, maybe AMP is their solution to this third-party interface "problem": create an incompatible "feature" that will encourage or force users to abandon standards-based tools.

Kind of like what's happened with Google Talk. God I miss the Mac's Messages app being able to interface with my work's gsuite chat.

FWIW, the iOS email client has improved a lot over the last few iOS versions. Worth checking out if you haven't looked at it for a while.

I actually intended my message to be inspiring. ;)

My point was that you can't go it alone and there are friends that will help you. I left a more theoretical justification in another sub-thread.