> To my thinking, ahat AMP does is create a political context that enables developers to push back. By setting an unambiguous standard and clear advantages to complying with it, developers have a weapon to push back next time Marketing wants to ad fifteen trackers or whatever. This is leverage that just was not prevent previously, and it can change decisions.

Yeah, I think this is exactly it. Just like web developers don'' t care about disabled people until law threatens penalties, they didn't care about performance until Google threatened penalties.

The question is - who else could provide same incentives as Google? How could an independent, non-corporate entitiy create the same pressure?

Normally I would say "That's what standards bodies and governemnts are for", but in this particular context both have failed. It's been thirty freaking years since the ADA, and most websites are still not accessible. Standards bodies both move slowly and are historically bad at achieving widespread implementation in reasonable timeframes.

The other answer is "Browser makers"... but that's also Google. And maybe Mozilla, which is arguably the "independent, non-corporate entity" you'd like.

Really though, this works because Google has the technical chops to make it work and the positioning to make people want to do it. I cannot think of a single "independent, non-corporate entity" that's both positioned to do this and capable of it.

> they didn't care about performance until Google threatened penalties.

But that's not an appropriate role for Google. They aren't, and shouldn't be, the web equivalent of fashion police.

All Google has to do is reward site improvements in critical metrics. That's it. If my page is going to rank higher because it's faster, I will optimize the hell out of my site. But Google has been really unclear about the amount of impact those improvements have, especially as they compare to building an AMP site that will without question be featured in their carousel.

What metrics are you thinking of? Page size and load speed are the typical ones. There may be some wrinkles to measuring those well, given how dynamic modern pages often are. That would make any such metrics relatively easily gameable. It might also be challenging to turn measured improvements into measurable gains in SERPs, which means the gains in corporate politics are limited.

AMP avoids all of that. It also brings security benefits by getting rid of basically every tag that can be used to mount attacks on the browser.

Also, it's been known for quite a long time that users like faster sites, resulting in much lower bounce rates. Was that not enough for you to optimize the hell out of your site? It's been my experience that in a lot of companies, it isn't enough. Marketing or publishing or whichever department can attach dollar amounts to the tracker or ad or whatever they want to add, and devs can only handwave around experience.

It's not a winning proposition.

They did exactly that and you can find several talks about how they prioritize performance. Didn't work.

It could only be used as a tie-breaker for search results with the same level of confidence, anyway.

It would be ridiculous to down-rank the exact thing the user is searching for just because the user would have to wait 800ms longer for that information. Or up-rank something the user isn't looking for just because it loads faster.

The best Google can do is bluff about how much perf matters.

The efficacy of the incentive is linked directly to the strength of its effect. If optimizing the hell out of your company's site only matters in extreme cases where it's a tiebreaker among hundreds of other signals, the people who want the things that make pages slow will win. They will be able to point to more tangible and measurable benefits, and the effect of the tiebreaker will be lost in statistical noise.

It may just be unfounded cynicism on my part, but this does not sound like a better web experience. It sounds like the web circa 2009-2015. It sounds, to me, exactly like all the things we'd like to get away from with something less intrusive than AMP.