[hw]

Isn't that up to the developers themselves - whether they want to shoot themselves in the foot by slowing down their site by including lots of JS? Who is Google to determine how the Internet should be run? Shoving AMP down people's throat - because Google can as it owns majority browser and search market share - is akin to large governments in the world pushing their weight around and sticking their noses in other countries' issues.

I cringe everytime I visit a page that's AMP enabled, and usually bounce or just get on a desktop. Sure, promote a 'faster' web, but if it's at the expense of a horrible experience, why?

[izacus]

No, it's akin to large governments swooping in and regulating industries when they start hurting people en masse. Web developers weren't professional enough to make the web fast. AMP isn't the right solution, but the community itself was incapable of policing itself so it was just a question of time before it happened.

Before that, people were massively moving to the apps because the web got too slow and unusable on mobile.

[lwansbrough]

Who elected Google to act on our behalf? Free market takes care of slow sites. Either they’re too slow to use or they’re not.

[joshuamorton]

And they did. Google, a member of the free market, found that slow sites were negatively impacting them. So it took action.

[cameronbrown]

Last time I checked, Google is part of the free market, no? This is exactly how free markets work. And if it turns out AMP is really bad for the web, then the reverse will happen too at some point.

[dictum]

> Web developers weren't professional enough to make the web fast.

Don't shit on (other?) developers to make your point. It's revisionism that only serves the purpose of taking more control from users and developers, which just conveniently gives even more power to the stakeholders who most benefit from the structurally unsound game businesses have been playing.

By the same logic, I could say the Google Chrome team (not related to AMP — just a metaphor) isn't professional enough to make a browser that uses less RAM. In reality, the team deals with a myriad of constraints and other priorities, both technical and commercial, that sometimes clash. Rendering speed and security are its major selling points; if both are met, management is satisfied and Google makes billions.

I'm loath to say this, but performance isn't where a lot of websites make money. It's the ads that people click, way too often by mistake. To feed this system, a bootload of tracking scripts, A/B testing scripts, overeager live support widgets...

Google is coyly selling preferred placement in exchange for performance, which may be the only way to get some businesses to care about performance. Developers are cranking out what the business owners are asking for.

Ask yourself why Google did not take aim at the ownership side, why it did not arrange discussions with major media companies etc. to establish performance as a company-wide goal, instead, put the responsibility on developers.

> Before that, people were massively moving to the apps because the web got too slow and unusable on mobile.

Yeah, the thought process to go from seeing the "use our mobile app instead! It's so much better!" banner, closing it and sending my eyes onto the content that I wanted to read takes at least half a second.

[hw]

> No, it's akin to large governments swooping in and regulating industries when they start hurting people en masse

Okay, I can see that. The idea of Google being the gatekeeper and regulator of the Internet is scary though, especially given it's a for-profit corporation that has its own interests at hand. I think AMP would have been better if it started off as a proposal for it being a standard to HTML, voted on and governed by the W3C, instead of by Google.

> Web developers weren't professional enough to make the web fast

I would argue though, that web developers who are professional enough to adopt AMP, would be professional enough to ensure their site doesn't load bloat.

[jacquesm]

It is actually the opposite, it is a large corporation abusing its position to entrench itself even more. It has nothing to do with regulation. If google wanted to do the right thing all they had to do was penalize the bloat.

[bduerst]

Except we've seen that it's not up to the developers, but some product manager or marketer who is willing to sacrifice the mobile experience for email popups, autoplaying ad videos with sound, loading 50MB of unoptimized content, and other value-sucking tragedy of the commons behavior.