There has been a lot of attempts to control the web over the years but one of the more persuasive and hostile takeover has been Google AMP, the “solution” of Google to the website obesity problem.
I need to add here that the intention (making a faster, less bloated web) are honorable 1 , does it justify the degree of control that the parent company exercises over the web as a result?
- AMP pages are hosted on Google servers, removing control for the website owner and centralizing more and more the web
- Mob-like tactics to force you to use AMP (“would be a shame if… you didn’t appear on this carousel, hu?”)
- For some website, being AMP-compliant require adding more stuff resulting in often worse load-times
AMP is About Control (in my opinion)
It is about getting more user data. Sure, it “fixes” problems created by publishers/some developers themselves. But fundamentally it is about getting big websites traffic on Google servers.
It’s sad people think it’s “unreasonable” to de-bloat a website, but taking time to implement APM is a “good idea”.