No one’s AMPing up the love
Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages technology, known as AMP among web publishers, took a beating this week as an antitrust lawsuit filed by the Attorney General of Texas charged that the ad biz used AMP to hinder competition. And on Friday, Terence Eden, a member of the AMP Advisory Committee, which was formed two years ago in response to criticism that the AMP project ignored publisher concerns, announced his resignation, citing the project’s failure to make the web better. AMP was created by Google in 2015, ostensibly as a way to make mobile web pages load faster but also as a defense against content formats like Apple News Format and Facebook Instant Articles. It requires web developers to code their web pages in a particular way using a subset of HTML and JavaScript to ensure the pages can be loaded efficiently. The technology has had detractors almost since its inception, based on claims it disempowers publishers by disassociating content from its domain of origin – Google serves cached AMP articles from its servers – and cements Google’s already considerable power over the web. By 2018, several months after the publication of an open letter opposing AMP, Google attempted to mollify critics by broadening governance of the open source project beyond Google employees. The ad biz put further distance between itself and AMP in June, 2020, when it surrendered AMP to the OpenJS Foundation. And in a concession last month, following the US Department of Justice’s antitrust lawsuit in October, Google said it will end preferential treatment for AMP pages in its mobile Top Stories carousel come May, 2021. Any goodwill Google won through its actions could be undone if the claims about AMP in the Texas AG’s complaint against Google prove true.
