Google and AMP: Good Enough

July 10, 2023

Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.

Due to the rise of mobile devices circa the 2010s, the Internet was slammed with slow-loading Web-sites. In 2015, Google told publishers it had a solution dubbed “Accelerated Mobile Pages” (AMP). Everyone bought into AMP but it soon proved to be more like a “Speed Trap” says The Verge.

AMP worked well at first but it was hard to use advertising tools that were not from Google. Google’s plan to make the Internet great again backfired. Seventeen state attorneys filed a lawsuit with AMP as a key topic against Google in 2020. The lawsuit alleges Google purposefully designed AMP to prevent publishers from using alternative ad tools. The US Justice Department filed an antitrust lawsuit in January 2023, claiming Google is attempting to control more of the Internet.

A creature named Googzilla chats with a well-known publisher about a business relationship. Googzilla is definitely impressed with the publisher’s assertion that quality news can generate traffic and revenue without a certain Web search company’s help. Does the publisher trust Googzilla? Sure, the publisher says, “We just have lunch and chat. No problem.”

Google promised that AMP would drive more traffic to publishers’ Web sites and it would fix the loading speed lag. Google was the only big tech company that offered a viable solution to the growing demand mobile devices created, so everyone was forced to adopt AMP. Google did not care as long as it was the only player in the game:

“As long as anyone played the game, everybody had to. ‘Google’s strategy is always to create prisoner’s dilemmas that it controls — to create a system such that if only one person defects, then they win,’ a former media executive says. As long as anyone was willing to use AMP and get into that carousel, everyone else had to do the same or risk being left out.”

Google promised AMP would be open source but Google flip-flopped on that decision whenever it suited the company. Non-Google developers “fixed” AMP by working through its locked down structure so it could support other tools. Because of their efforts AMP got better and is now a decent tool. Google, however, trundles along. Perhaps Google is just misunderstood.

Whitney Grace, July 10, 2023

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Business strategy, Google, News

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.