Restraint can't appear out of nowhere, especially when bloating the website frequently works - more ad revenue, more information about existing visitors and potential new customers.
These needs won't just disappear, so yes, the problem needs a technical solution.
Rather than pushing for AMP, Google, Bing, etc. could just penalize websites (more heavily) for size in search rankings.
Remember, it's about providing a good experience to the users, it's not about choosing the losers and winners in the industry.
The taxi companies are making the same mistake against Uber, they assume that the users are an exploitable resource and want a solution that distributes this resource more "fairly to the businesses". From Uber's perspective, the users are the clientele and the resources are the cars and the drivers.
The web tech community is acting like the taxi drivers, angry that their user resource is being taken away.
Is it not obvious? It would motivate major websites to clean up their act and sort out the bloat problem, with no need for yet another web technology.
With AMP it's cheap and quick to implement, how long will it take for the websites to re-implement their codebase and all the tooling to match the performance criteria?
Anyway, you're missing the point that I'm trying to make here: It's about the user's experience, it's not about the user's distribution to businesses.
It's not your god given right to have users and make money.
The way I see it, as people who have more knowledge about this domain than the average user, it's actively our responsibility to act in the best interest of the user (our parents, friends, etc.), even if said user might not appreciate or understand the effort.
In the same way that I appreciate, say, doctors actively working against stupid/pointless stuff (homeopathy, avoid vaccination), I appreciate IT people trying to think beyond the immediate convenience of AMP.
Maybe the developers themselves are more idealistic but the web based businesses themselves more often than not are quite exploitative towards the users and that’s we have this sorry state of the web in general.
Fair point - changes to Google's rankings apply more pressure to small websites than to established ones.
> it's not about the user's distribution to businesses. It's not your god given right to have users and make money.
What?
What?
Why do you think this has any connection to our conversation?
The web community acts as if the users are a commodity like oil and Google just made a change in its flow and now begging Google to make it flow like before to accommodate their business setup and promising that from now on they will be nicer to the commodity and store it in golden barrels.
I just don't buy it.
I am a user; I do not develop for the the web or operate a business that has a web presence. I hate AMP. It gets in the way of my search workflow on mobile; it fucks up links that I want to save or share; I suspect that Google intends to further reduce my ability to avoid it over time.
But you're talking to one.
> begging Google to make it flow like before
My understanding is that AMP doesn't necessarily impact ad revenues ( https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Accelerated_Mobil... ). If it did, it wouldn't see adoption, no?
I dislike AMP for essentially the same reasons listed in the article.
Additionally, I value parsimony, which isn't mentioned in the article. I disdain anything that further bloats the web stack. Unless there's a very good reason for a new web technology - and here, there isn't - then we shouldn't further complicate the standards or our browsers.
As for your ad revenue argument, not all the benefit from users is the direct ad revenue.
Bloat is a technical concern, but my other concerns are largely political, yes.
You seem to want to imply that this invalidates my opinion. Not so.
> not all the benefit from users is the direct ad revenue
Sure - such as readership - but which of them are impacted by AMP?