The thing is, from their point of view they aren't evil; they are "making the web faster", they say (and they're not wrong) that most sites are so full of crap like trackers and adverts that it negatively impacts your browsing experience.
This Twitter post costs me 1.6MB of bandwidth and it keeps pinging for more stuff, and that's with an ad blocker enabled. While we're talking just bytes in terms of the main message.
Google is selling it as an improvement to the web, but that also says a lot about websites.
But this has been Google's strategy for a while now; they push technology that make the web faster and accessible to more people (like Chrome, HTTP/2 and 3, webp/webm, google DNS, google fiber (discontinued), Android, etc) and score goodwill, but at the same time they know if people can browse faster they will run into Google ads more often, earning them more money.
AMP is no different; if a site that doesn't even have google ads takes 10 seconds to load, they earn nothing. If the same content takes <1 second to load, WITH google ads, they earn money. And they earn money more often because people can consume more content instead of wait for things to load.
Amp-the-standard is not the same thing as amp-the-google-UX.
I'd love for sites to adopt AMP, as a standard for web design which leads to very lean sites without content pop-in. That'd be awesome! Give me a little icon next to the search result that says "this site is AMP certified" so I know it'll be fast.
But what I don't love, is that Google uses AMP as a trojan horse to keep me inside the google search results as I browse the internet, by:
- Rehosting the amp sites on their CDN
- Pre-rendering sites I haven't clicked yet to make them load faster
- Putting the site in some pop-over div which makes me feel like I'm still in the google results (so I can pop right back quickly and spend more time on google!)
This Twitter post costs me 1.6MB of bandwidth and it keeps pinging for more stuff, and that's with an ad blocker enabled. While we're talking just bytes in terms of the main message.
Google is selling it as an improvement to the web, but that also says a lot about websites.
But this has been Google's strategy for a while now; they push technology that make the web faster and accessible to more people (like Chrome, HTTP/2 and 3, webp/webm, google DNS, google fiber (discontinued), Android, etc) and score goodwill, but at the same time they know if people can browse faster they will run into Google ads more often, earning them more money.
AMP is no different; if a site that doesn't even have google ads takes 10 seconds to load, they earn nothing. If the same content takes <1 second to load, WITH google ads, they earn money. And they earn money more often because people can consume more content instead of wait for things to load.