If you can convince marketers to stop loading up pages with nigh endless amounts of tracking, tag managers and dozens of ad units (from all different sources) then I'm sure we'd see an immediate increase in page performance. (I suspect many sites are already quite fast before they get weighed back down by marketing)
Let/encourage developers (front-end and back-end) to optimise for performance and I'm sure we'd all see fantastic gains! All without needing to feed Google even more than we already do.
I like this answer so much better than mine, I should go and delete mine! Ask any shopping site how many tracking pixels, analytics scripts, etc that they have included. They'll tell you they're all necessary.
> talks about Google's (less than neutral) motivations/actions.
Google is a company, its motivation is profit. Did you really expect otherwise? Do you really think Facebook wants to "make the world more connected"?
Where do (or would) you put your savings? Let me guess, in the assets that provide the best return/risk? Why do you expect that the companies you're investing in expecting the highest returns would act in any different way?
I certainly don't begrudge them a single dime of profit. Just using their position as "the de-factor search engine" to hype the sites using _their_ tech is a sleazy move. They spent years positioning themselves as the best search engine... and why? Because when you looked for something, you found it, usually within the first 3 or 4 results. Now, those results aren't really the most relevant, they're the ones with the home field advantage. So no, I never bought into that "don't be evil" garbage... but, I don't like them having the position and weight that they do.
I don't understand this idea that seeking profit somehow ablates them of consequences.
Just because they can make a profit doing something doesn't mean they should be allowed to continue, especially if the mechanism of profit damages public or communal infrastructure/resources/etc.
Do you really want to sit by and let them ruin the web just because they can make money doing so?
Let/encourage developers (front-end and back-end) to optimise for performance and I'm sure we'd all see fantastic gains! All without needing to feed Google even more than we already do.