>>...and that the company went so far as to hinder non-AMP ads "by giving them artificial one second delays" to convince publishers not to use header bidding.
Isn't this criminal, as in facing jail time? And this was not done by a rogue person, execs debated this and entire teams implemented and knew about this.
It’s not criminal, nor should it be, or do you want it to be.
Among other things, criminal law requires a higher level of proof. Whatever benefit you hope for would be nullified by far fewer actual prosecutions and convictions.
"At this point in time with the AMP project, Google can’t retroactively release the control it had in AMP’s adoption. And we can’t go back to a pre-AMP web to start over [...]"
Why not? Someone with AMP knowledge knows why? Wouldn't it be as easy as removing a few tags?
Actually, we pretty much can. Anyone _not_ using Google's search engine and browser is still living on a non-AMP word, and is able to access the web pretty much fine.
That page is basically trumpeting the massive adoption of AMP. So my read here is that the author is viewing this a bit like Flash: yes, we could kill it, but it would take years, because of the billions of pages that use it, as well as the custom markup it uses, along with the unique caching structure discussed in the EFF post.
I don't find that particularly compelling, but I can see the reasoning. It may be a case where it would be possible to just redirect all traffic away from AMP, but that would kill page speed, and therefore search ranking, for those using it. Theoretically possible? Sure. Practical? Possibly not.
I don’t think the EFF rep was trying to say AMP is technically integral to the web experience today and can’t be removed (which it definitely can be). Rather that it is a technology that is useful and can be powerful, and we should pursue continued development of it in an open way. As much as I don’t like AMP myself, there are numerous people in regions worldwide who do appreciate it that live in low bandwidth, data limited, bad connection areas.
Isn't this criminal, as in facing jail time? And this was not done by a rogue person, execs debated this and entire teams implemented and knew about this.