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Comment by romanovcode | Hacker News Reader

The fact that website content is stored on Google servers and being served from Google is just disgusting.

Giving you free hosting all across the world, much closer to your users, is disgusting?

Unless you're hosting a webserver on your computer, your server is most likely being hosted in the cloud somewhere (aka some random computer somewhere in the world). How is it being on a Google server, instead of company X's server, suddenly disgusting?

Because such centralization gives Google immense power. The sheer potential censorship implications alone are very concerning, for example.

So how about other CDNs like Cloudflare?

Well you don't have the choice with AMP. In an open and neutral Internet, choosing your CDN would be up to you and optional and you could switch to anyone you'd like if concerns arise.

You do have the choice... The only part that forces you to use Google's cache is to get on their search carousel, but other than that, you can still use AMP and not their cache.

If your competitors are doing it, and you want to survive, you don't have a choice.

By that logic, does AWS have huge amount of power? Why does it matter what server the content is hosted on? Aren't almost all websites hosted on a remote server? The only difference is Google gets to choose what shows up on their search, and they always had that control anyway.

Yes, AWS has a huge amount of power, and no, they shouldn’t have it. You need an economy of small businesses to allow innovation and startups. No startup can compete in an economy full of big players.

Not all of it is. Most i've seen recently have a /amp/ subdir on the correct domain, not Google.

That's just the publisher putting AMP versions on a different URL, Google's still going to cache it and serve it from its own.

So don’t search with Google and it won’t affect you.

Is hosting your site on Google Cloud Platform equally disgusting?

AMP forces it, GCP is a choice

AMP is a choice. Otherwise, this article wouldn't have been written!

Yes, it is technically a choice. But since Google abuses their search monopoly to coerce people to start using AMP it is not a free choice any more. There is a price to pay for not using AMP and that price has nothing to do with your users.

As a user, can you please show me how I can opt out of AMP?

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