> google is abusing it's monopoly search position to pre-load.
How is that abusing their monopoly search position? Abusing their monopoly search position would be making publishers integrate directly with them to enable preload, like Apple News. Instead, they ask publishers to serve documents that can safely be prerendered, and all their competitors get to (and do!) consume those documents as well to enable safe prerendering from their own sites.
> Without their monopoly search position no one would be forced to adopt amp
It is used by the major search engines in every major market, so yes, they would be forced to adopt AMP. Compare to Apple News, which gives the publisher even less control.
Once again, how is it abusing their monopoly position if all their competitors get to benefit from it for free?
Finally, how do you propose to enable safe prerendering on the web that you would be fine with? RSS enables the same thing but takes even more control away from the publisher, but you're presumably fine with that. Not a single person in all these AMP rant articles that pollute HN has ever proposed an alternative, with 99% of the ranters, including this one, not even understanding the basic fact that prerendering is the thing that AMP enables.
Tell that to Apple, Facebook, and RSS aggregators, all of which do the same thing but worse. Whether or not you want it, I and apparently most other users do want it.
As has been mentioned before, what Apple, Facebook, and RSS aggregators are doing is quite different than what Google is: they're not purporting to be search engines.
If you don't want Apple News formatted content, don't use the Apple News client.
The web is supposed to be an open standard.
If Google wants to go off and make Google Web a thing, where it only allows Chrome to view content hosted by some variation of *.google.com, thats their choice, but that isn't "the web".
> If you don't want Apple News formatted content, don't use the Apple News client.
If you don't want AMP content, don't click on it from Google, Bing, Yandex, Twitter, etc. Exactly the same idea.
> It only allows Chrome to view content hosted by some variation of *.google.com
That is not what AMP does. It allows browsers to safely prerender content from any link aggregator, including Bing and others. It does not change what Chrome can do. The page is just a normal HTML page served by the link aggregator's AMP cache.
Think about how you would implement safe prerendering. Can you come up with any option where the link aggregator doesn't host the page? There's your answer.
A priori not anymore so than otherwise downranking slow sites. The missing piece here is how using amp is beneficial to Google or harmful to consumers/other search engines to make it anticompetative.
You are correct, most people are leaving this out. I think an emphasis on asking why Google is pushing AMP, and whether that interest aligns with consumers, would be helpful in this thread.
Most people seem to intrinsically understand that a single browser-making ad company dictating what features a website can or can not use is about that company flexing it's muscles to control things.
> Most people seem to intrinsically understand that a single browser-making ad company dictating what features a website can or can not use is about that company flexing it's muscles to control things.
But the point made up-thread was that "controlling things" is not intrinsically bad. The problem was that (according to some users) Google was abusing a monopoly position to control things in a way that would be beneficial to itself, but harmful to others. The question the parent to my comment was asking was, beneficial to itself how? You saying that Google is "controlling things" just takes us back to where we started, but doesn't answer the question of what Google stands to gain.
Let me give an example. Suppose by "controlling things" you mean incentivizing ("""forcing""") web developers to create pages that are better because they have lighter scripts and higher security standards for third party content. (In fact, this is what some supporters say Google is doing.) I don't think most people would have a problem with that. So presumably critics have something interesting to say about what "controlling things" really means that explains why it's bad in this particular case.
> But the point made up-thread was that "controlling things" is not intrinsically bad
Well that point is wrong. If you can't see how a single, privacy abusing company having dominant control over the web is bad, I can't fucking help you.
> a single, privacy abusing company having dominant control over the web is bad
I agree that that's bad. I also don't think you (or most people in this thread) have made coherent arguments for why AMP is helping Google do that. That was the parent comment's point, and I tried to highlight that because it's downvoted.
Note that "control things" is a different claim than "having dominant control over the web". It's obvious that in some sense Google is doing the first. It's obvious that the second is bad. The issue is how you get from saying that they're doing the first thing to saying that they're doing the second thing.
Google has a monopoly position, granted. But not everything a monopolist does is bad just because they're a monopolist. Another example: one thing Google does is lower the page rank of sites that show the full content to the GoogleBot but paywall real users. I think this is great! It's an attempt to control the way publishers design websites and the way their servers respond to user agents, but the point of that control is making the web a better place. Many people feel similarly about AMP: that it's getting publishers to create faster pages that make the web a better place. Can you say why they're wrong?
Google has a de facto monopoly on site rankings, which gives it de facto editorial control over the content of the Internet down to a very fine level.
If Google decides to drop a site from search, that site loses traffic and is effectively removed from visibility.
This is not a user choice. Users do not to get to say "Well, that site is too slow for me, so I won't visit it again. And actually I don't like the content either."
It's not a site owner choice. Owners can't respond to user preferences by improving performance or offering different content.
It's a Google choice. And the reasons for Google's choices are typically opaque, largely unstated, and never negotiated directly with site owners.
It's absolutely unacceptable for a single unaccountable corporation to have this level level of control over global information infrastructure.
In fact the whole idea of generic but opaque site ranking is toxic to an open Internet, and always has been. The idea that page rank has some kind of objective user value - as opposed to monopoly value - has always been debatable.
It was tolerable conceit in the days of Alta Vista when search was a research project, and some level of good faith was assumed.
But Google has trashed that good faith by operating like a bad actor - and monopolist - in numerous ways, AMP being the most recent example.
What you're arguing against is opaque site rankings. But what does that have to do with AMP as a technology? How does AMP enable them to have more opaque rankings than before? All the control you're talking about is something they'd have regardless of the existence of AMP.
AMP is an example of the bad faith exercising of that monopoly. Bad faith because we judge it by the negative press: there is considerable push back and controversy, yet it remains. That alone separates it from other factors like “actual page speed”, which is also used but which everyone agrees with, which is why it’s considered good faith.
No need to judge it based on its technical merit: a significant amount of people hate it, yet here it is. End of.
This is not a legal question (yet), this is a moral question. The legal [and technical] question is relevant, but not the be all end all of any discussion. People sometimes also just want to discuss how they feel. It’s relevant to get consensus about that. And people feel bad about AMP.
Yes it's true that they forced AMP despite some people not wanting it (and I think you are greatly overestimating the fraction of customers that actually care about this either way). But you know what they say, ask customers what they want and they'll say a faster horse. I don't think there's anything wrong or immoral about going against the current wishes of your customers to further the long term wishes of your customers instead.
That is much different than saying that Google is using AMP to make it easier to control results which was what the parent seemed to be implying. If this discussion is really not about AMP at all, but just about Google flexing their monopoly to do things customers don't want, then why is AMP the technology getting criticized for it? Why weren't we criticizing using SSL everywhere when Google depriortitzed non-SSL results?
It literally means a person who purchases something.
No sane person on the planet would consider a person using a search engine for free, "the customer". The customer is the person who buys something - in Google's case, advertising.
But there's a difference between having a service which only shows your stuff, and having a service which apparently shows the entire internet, but subtly prefers your stuff. Most people find the latter far more questionable than the former, because if we want to find anything, we need to know where to look.
It prefers instant loading pages because that's what users want. If not, Bing, Yandex, Baidu, Yahoo, or any of the other search engines that also use AMP would simply rank differently to beat Google.
The things that's being discussed though is that even if your page loads in "no time" AMP will be perfered anyways, even if your page loads fast enough that the user wont notice a difference.
There is no fast enough that a user won't notice the difference between that and instant, especially due to RTT for the request. That's why I always click on results with the lightning icon, and that's what I figure enough other users do too in order for AMP pages to rank so highly. If that's not the case, the other search engines can rank differently to beat Google, as I said.
How is that abusing their monopoly search position? Abusing their monopoly search position would be making publishers integrate directly with them to enable preload, like Apple News. Instead, they ask publishers to serve documents that can safely be prerendered, and all their competitors get to (and do!) consume those documents as well to enable safe prerendering from their own sites.