[lern_too_spel]

> 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.

[saagarjha]

I don’t want prerendering if it comes with this attached to it. Fast pages don’t need prerendering.

[lern_too_spel]

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.

[saagarjha]

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.

[lern_too_spel]

And how is that any different? The end result is they're forcing publishers to use their format.

[stephenr]

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".

[lern_too_spel]

> 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.

[squiggleblaz]

Why does safe prerendering need to break URLs? Why can't the pages be safely prerendered client side?

[lern_too_spel]

> Why does safe prerendering need to break URLs?

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.