Yes, Google did whatever maximally benefits Google. They're a corporation and behave as such. Just like Apple won't de-DRM their cable protocols just because it's "right".
The question is - what can the web community do to make AMP redundant outside of complaint posts.
First, AMP is already redundant. it doesnt offer anything that stripped-down html can't do. The primary reason sites choose it is because google ranks the pages higher! it's purely coercive.
Second , it's not as if AMP has taken over the web. But this coercion has to stop. Third, it's real easy to make a faster website with 10 minutes of work. I 'm not sure we need some kind of activism to stop amp i do believe it will crash on its own as soon as most sites look exactly alike and start losing revenues. But until then ... maybe ban AMP links?
If it's so easy then why have so few websites done it? Google has understood what Google/AMP haters refuse to see: web performance is not an engineering problem, it's a product and marketing problem. Coercion is exactly what's needed to push website owners to prioritize performance, because HN's monthly whinefest isn't cutting it. Here's two basic things AMP offers that stripped-down HTML can't do: a world-class CDN that many website owners won't justify investing in, and a clear, marketable incentive to develop a mobile-efficient website that VPs, marketers, product managers, and other business stakeholders can immediately understand.
Because the vast majority of websites are reasonably fast on mobile? Loading times of 1,2 or 5 seconds are a non-problem that amp is addressing. The worst offenders i see are too high res images and autoplay videos, but frankly i cant remember seeing any of those recently. Most blogs/news sites are fine. Where is google sourcing their data that users are desperate for web-breaking solutions that bring them 200msec response times? The purpose of AMP is so that people flick a website instantly and then go back to google. That's obviously not in the interest of the publishers. The whinefest is because google is actively prioritizing amp publishers thus forcing it on the web.
> Coercion is exactly what's needed to push
this is not a defensible statement
> a world-class CDN that many website owners
facebook needs a world-class cdn, not blogs.
> a clear, marketable incentive to develop a mobile-efficient websit
the "marketable incentive" is the de-ranking of the site. It's entirely unnecessary to force amp for that, a simple page speed deranking would do
Google knows load performance is a critical user need from the ample data they collect from Google search users, they've talked about this before. I forget the exact number, but every 100ms less load time drives significantly more traffic and engagement. I have no idea what data you're looking at that implies 5s load times are not a problem. I, for one, am overjoyed the Google is tackling this problem and succeeding at it.
Google has applied performance penalties to sites before and it still does. It's not enough, and there are limits to the penalties they can apply because these websites are ultimately very useful and relevant, it would worsen search quality to derank useful but bloated websites. The carousel is a good balance of incentive and penalty.
The question is - what can the web community do to make AMP redundant outside of complaint posts.