Google AMP gets a shock to its system as advisor quits, lawsuit claims foul play | Hacker News Reader

Google AMP gets a shock to its system as advisor quits, lawsuit claims foul play

theregister.com

74 pointschriszhang14 comments

>>...and that the company went so far as to hinder non-AMP ads "by giving them artificial one second delays" to convince publishers not to use header bidding.

Isn't this criminal, as in facing jail time? And this was not done by a rogue person, execs debated this and entire teams implemented and knew about this.

What law would it be breaking? What is the likelihood of that law being enforced against a multi billion dollar business?

Anticompetitive Tying. Google used the existing ad monopoly to try to gain a news distribution monopoly.

Pretty low.

Looks like fraud to me. The webpages were made slow by Google and the reason given was different than the cause of the slowdown.

PURPOSEFULLY interfered with someone else's product by making it slower. Like Pepsi finding a way to dilute Coke's concentration in each bottle.

Not criminal, but certainly grounds for antitrust.

It’s not criminal, nor should it be, or do you want it to be.

Among other things, criminal law requires a higher level of proof. Whatever benefit you hope for would be nullified by far fewer actual prosecutions and convictions.

"At this point in time with the AMP project, Google can’t retroactively release the control it had in AMP’s adoption. And we can’t go back to a pre-AMP web to start over [...]"

Why not? Someone with AMP knowledge knows why? Wouldn't it be as easy as removing a few tags?

Actually, we pretty much can. Anyone _not_ using Google's search engine and browser is still living on a non-AMP word, and is able to access the web pretty much fine.

Load of horseshit. Google could make every single AMP URL redirect to the real page and scrap the whole thing tomorrow.

Yes. Straight up lie. Do they know that? It seems like lying would be bad damage control, but I guess fud works

This caught my eye as well. The quote is pulled from the final paragraph of this EFF blog post:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/07/googles-amp-canonical-...

That post also doesn't really explain, but justifies its position by linking to the AMP blog:

https://blog.amp.dev/2018/02/13/amps-new-horizons/

That page is basically trumpeting the massive adoption of AMP. So my read here is that the author is viewing this a bit like Flash: yes, we could kill it, but it would take years, because of the billions of pages that use it, as well as the custom markup it uses, along with the unique caching structure discussed in the EFF post.

I don't find that particularly compelling, but I can see the reasoning. It may be a case where it would be possible to just redirect all traffic away from AMP, but that would kill page speed, and therefore search ranking, for those using it. Theoretically possible? Sure. Practical? Possibly not.

I don’t think the EFF rep was trying to say AMP is technically integral to the web experience today and can’t be removed (which it definitely can be). Rather that it is a technology that is useful and can be powerful, and we should pursue continued development of it in an open way. As much as I don’t like AMP myself, there are numerous people in regions worldwide who do appreciate it that live in low bandwidth, data limited, bad connection areas.

The component parts of this story have been extensively discussed this month.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25466416

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25448718

Reply on news.ycombinator.com