Hacker News Reader

Comment by bobfunk | Hacker News Reader

To me the proposal there is arguably even scarier than what AMP is doing now.

It requires changing browsers, to let people distribute Google Hosted Apps on their own domains (as long as Google approves). Sites distributed in this way will get preferential treatment by Google.

This is essentially an App store model, similar to Google Play, and the really big danger is that we end up in a place where you either distribute (and host) your website through Google's AMP registry, or you're not actually on the web (in the same way that distributing your Android app as an APK outside of the Play store is not a realistic distribution channel).

I hope Firefox, Safari and Edge will resist this.

View on HN

> you either distribute (and host) your website through Google's AMP registry

As long as anyone can setup their own AMP-like cache and build a search engine similar to Google, that also supports preloading... then I'm not sure it so bad.

The proposal GP refers to has a lot of use-cases, it basically makes caching of HTTPS by third-parties possible. At-least to some extent.

> As long as anyone can setup their own AMP-like cache and build a search engine similar to Google, that also supports preloading... then I'm not sure it so bad.

Yes, anyone could build a cache. But can anyone build a cache that can compete with Google's absolutely massive infrastructure and pile of money, not to mention the reach they already have with search?

I'd say this is not a discussion on the level of ‘can you build a better product and win from a giant company?’, more like ‘can you build a planet and get everyone to move there?’

I agree, doing it is a different thing.

cloudflare is already doing an AMP-cache. If the specs works out I'm sure other big players might join.

But yes, taking on Google search is hard.

Cloudflare can (and does). So do Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and a few others.

Yes, the web is dominated by big companies more than ever before but there's at least some competition left.

> It requires changing browsers, to let people distribute Google Hosted Apps on their own domains

Does it? The web packaging spec linked to doesn't seem to require any of that. And it's intended as an open standard for all browsers to implement, so you wouldn't need to switch.

I mean it's just looks like content addressing with more steps. Really rough around the edges but the idea that large static portions of the web could be cached by anyone sounds great.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com