Google’s AMP Poised to Take the Lead from Facebook’s and Apple’s Walled Gardens

From the F.A.Q:

Accelerated Mobile Pages are just like any other HTML page, but with a limited set of allowed technical functionality that is defined and governed by the open source AMP spec

And from the Spec:

Enable the AMP runtime to manage the loading of external resources, which may slow down the initial render or cause jank. Allow AMP authors to include functionality above and beyond standard HTML, while maintaining the security- and performance-minded requirement that no author-written JavaScript is executed

Appears we won't have access to Canvas2D, WebGL, WebRTC, Fetch and other HTML5 Web APIs. AMP's subset of declarative elements and caching will be great for longform-y "static" content. The kind of articles I find myself reading more of on Mobile Chrome during down times in transit. Thinking of Medium confessionals and NewYorker dispatches, etc.

But how do you implement something like ChartBeat? Snapshots of dynamic chart images and data pre-rendered on the server and pushed out to the cdn? Sort of eliminates the performance benefits of geospatial caching doesn't it...

I do take heart however in Tony Haile's pull quote from the ampproject.org homepage:

The mobile open web experience is terrible and some have suggested it's too slow to compete. We can choose to see the mobile open web as a relic of its time and flee to the warm embrace of closed platforms and apps. Or we can say that the open web means something important to the world and if it’s broken it’s our job to fix it. I think we should fix it.

The second point is a restatement of the first:

* a responsive website

* with views for desktop, mobile and tablet

#3 and #4 are similarly redundant

#1 makes all of the apps unnecessary, along with AMP and Facebook Instant. See also the dismal return on the sunk cost for developing apps: http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/23/i-dont-want-your-app/

The real omission, however, should have been #0: “high-quality content”. Sure, you see the NYT, NPR, Guardian, et al. post a lot on Twitter, Facebook, etc. but they were already some of the most popular content on the web and would have been widely shared either way.

Even more centralization and single point of failure. If this continues the web as envisioned will be entirely replaced by a centralized system of walled gardens with big companies controlling access.

This is why we need IPFS sooner rather than later.

Keep in mind that the AMP caching infrastructure will also be able to serve as a tracking platform because it records every single IP address. This effectively grants Google and associates a defacto monopoly in terms of an unblockable mobile tracking platform in a world where ad-blockers are becoming ubiquitous.

I think it's a smart move on their part actually, but what I assume will eventually happen is other providers will come along and provide a similar free infrastructure but without retaining logs and then everyone will migrate to that. Google will have gotten the ball rolling, and benefited for a number of years from the data, but ultimately people on the web prefer not to be tracked.

Is this the relevant XKCD comic?

https://xkcd.com/927/