Then why the complaint about "phoning home"? Analogies are imprecise and brittle.
>This is a direct form of punishment from Google
If you show me some proof I'll be glad to believe you. Occam's razor says it's a simple fallback for unexpected results.
>Disabling the phone-home feature...
Blocking a required library? Who is straw-manning now?
Calling the phone home feature a required library is part of the malintent from Google. Most websites I interact with don’t need a Google Analytics in order to function, for example. If I block a Google Analytics they refuse to work. The simplest explanation here is that time-short programmers just copy the code presented by Google, who in turn want everything to report back to them so they can monetise third party sites.
Building your site for AMP and blindly using the 8s timeout from the Google copy and paste archive is exactly the same story. You don’t need that much time to load all the assets, that timeout is there only to punish people who block the AMP resources.
It is code required for the WebComponents to function. It's also charged with optimizations such as sandboxing of iframes, making requests synchronous, and calculating layout to reduce paints.
Clearly it's not "phoning home". The script provides clear actions, as laid out on the amp project website.
>You don’t need that much time to load all the assets
On American broadband, perhaps. Other countries do not have the same infrastructure.
>that timeout is there only to punish people who block the AMP resources.
Citation, not speculation, needed.
My complaint is not the use of CDN, it is the forced delay to load a page when the CDN is not available or certain resources are blocked. This is a direct form of punishment from Google: refuse to let us track everything you read, we will make it uncomfortable for you to read anything.
Disabling the phone-home feature is nothing like poking holes in the fuel tank.