Cake or death: AMP and the worrying power dynamics of the web | Andrew Betts
Andrew looks at AMP from a technical, UX, and commercial perspective. It looks pretty bad in all three areas. And the common thread is the coercion being applied to publishers.
But casting the web aside and pushing a new proprietary content format (which is optional, but see coercion) seems like an extraordinarily heavy handed way to address it. It’s like saying I see you have a graze on your knee so let’s chop off and replace your whole leg. Instead, we could use the carrot of a premium search result position (as AMP has done) and make it only possible to be there if your site is fast.
He’s absolutely right about how it sounds when the AMP team proudly talk about how many publishers are adopting their framework, as if the framework were actually standing on its own merits instead of being used to blackmail publishers:
It is utterly bizarre to me, akin to a street robber that has convinced himself that people just randomly like giving him their money and has managed to forget the fact that he’s holding a gun to their head.