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Comment by esteth | Hacker News Reader

I think so, because the spec prevents "death by a thousand cuts" and makes it crystal clear what's allowed and what's not.

If your marketing department want one more tracking script and your execs want one more pop up banner etc and each change is bad but not egregiously so, then your average "web guy" at most non-big-tech companies will just do what they're asked to.

With AMP they get to say "it's not possible"

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That social dynamic is real but it's trivially avoided: imagine if Google said that you had to consistently average, say, 1 second renders on mobile to be in the carousel or avoid being badged with a “This site is not recommended for mobile users” warning. Instead of saying “AMP doesn't allow it” you'd say “We're averaging 0.8 seconds already and this adds 0.4 seconds in our testing” and you could have a business decision about what makes the most sense for your project instead of outsourcing your project direction to Google.

If you think that’s trivial to implement, I’d love to hear where you’ve worked. Getting a change to the main .com at one company where I worked within a month was considered a rush job!

What mattered was that Google set a hard limit: do <x> to be in the carousel. I think that if they had done the exact same thing with a performance metric it would have unfolded very similarly because the key part was that it was a non-negotiable external mandate.

People might have had more room to negotiate on how to hit a performance target but the thing which would have mattered was a number in the webmasters tools console.

If Google penalized slow sites, they'd get to say that. I agree that none of this explains the need for AMP.

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