RFC 8752 - Report from the IAB Workshop on Exploring Synergy between Content Aggregation and the Publisher Ecosystem (ESCAPE)

Tough questions at Chrome Dev Summit’s AMA session • The Register

Forgive me for linking to The Rag, but for completeness’s sake, it would be remiss of me not to point out more coverage of “that” question I asked:

It was to the company’s credit that it chose to take the question posed by Clearleft’s Jeremy Keith, well known in the web standards community and who was briefly on the advisory committee for AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), before resigning saying that “it has become clear to me that AMP remains a Google product.” AMP has been in the news of late with a lawsuit alleging Google deliberately throttled ad load times to promote it, and Keith asked: “Given the court proceedings against AMP, why should anyone trust FLOC or any other Google initiatives ostensibly focused on privacy?”

AMP Has Irreparably Damaged Publishers’ Trust in Google-led Initiatives – WP Tavern

An article by Sarah Gooding, prompted by the question I asked at Chrome Dev Summit:

Jeremy Keith’s question referencing the AMP allegations in the recently unredacted antitrust complaint against Google was extremely unlikely to receive an adequate response from the Chrome Leadership team, but the mere act of asking is a public reminder of the trust Google has willfully eroded in pushing AMP on publishers.

The Shape Of The Machine « blarg?

On AMP:

Google could have approached the “be better on mobile” problem, search optimization and revenue sharing any number of ways, obviously, but the one they’ve chosen and built out is the one that guarantees that either you let them middleman all of your traffic or they cut off your oxygen.

There’s also this observation, which is spot-on:

Google has managed to structure this surveillance-and-value-extraction machine entirely out of people who are convinced that they, personally, are doing good for the world. The stuff they’re working on isn’t that bad – we’ve got such beautiful intentions!

Cake or death: AMP and the worrying power dynamics of the web | Andrew Betts

Andrew looks at AMP from a technical, UX, and commercial perspective. It looks pretty bad in all three areas. And the common thread is the coercion being applied to publishers.

But casting the web aside and pushing a new proprietary content format (which is optional, but see coercion) seems like an extraordinarily heavy handed way to address it. It’s like saying I see you have a graze on your knee so let’s chop off and replace your whole leg. Instead, we could use the carrot of a premium search result position (as AMP has done) and make it only possible to be there if your site is fast.

He’s absolutely right about how it sounds when the AMP team proudly talk about how many publishers are adopting their framework, as if the framework were actually standing on its own merits instead of being used to blackmail publishers:

It is utterly bizarre to me, akin to a street robber that has convinced himself that people just randomly like giving him their money and has managed to forget the fact that he’s holding a gun to their head.

A report from the AMP Advisory Committee Meeting – Terence Eden’s Blog

I completely agree with every single one of Terence’s recommendations here. The difference is that, in my case, they’re just hot takes, whereas he has actually joined the AMP Advisory Committee, joined their meetings, and listened to the concerns of actual publishers.

He finds:

• AMP isn’t loved by publishers
• AMP is not accessible
• No user research
• AMP spreads fake news
• Signed Exchanges are not the answer

There’s also a very worrying anti-competitive move by Google Search in only showing AMP results to users of Google Chrome.

I’ve been emailing with Paul from the AMP team and I’ve told him that I honestly think that AMP’s goal should be to make itself redundant …the opposite of the direction it’s going in.

As I said in the meeting - if it were up to me, I’d go “Well, AMP was an interesting experiment. Now it is time to shut it down and take the lessons learned back through a proper standards process.”

I suspect that is unlikely to happen. Google shows no sign of dropping AMP. Mind you, I thought that about Google+ and Inbox, so who knows!

Good point!