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AMP pages displaying your own domain

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Re: AMP pages displaying your own domain

#241
post #180

Using the signed exchange mechanism means you allow anyone to serve your content. You will no longer know when it has been served and by whom. Instead, Google will know more about what your users are consuming on your website than you - despite HTTPS! Also, there is no mechanism to limit who is allowed to serve your content for you. I see no technical reason why the content has to be prefetched from Google instead of…

The reason it has to be prefetched from not-you is to protect the users privacy. Until they click a link it is not considered acceptable to leak their search to the potential destination. Links have to be fetched from a third-party who the search engine trusts not to share the data, that at the moment is Google but will hopefully expand.

Google already can do this by preloading a cached page from its own domain. So this specification is unnecessary.

I think the real reason is that Google wants to build a walled garden, but doesn't want the walls to be noticeable. Even with AMP, they display a header that looks like a browser's address bar [1]

Also, on that page Google admits that it uses AMP Viewer to collect information about users:

> Data collection by Google is governed by Google’s privacy policy.

Which is probably their real motication for creating AMP.

[1] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/about-amp

Re: AMP pages displaying your own domain

#242
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I simply don't trust Google to not change the rules later. What will stop Google from down-grading 2nd class URLs (ie, not hosted with google) to page 2 results? It's effectively the same thing as having no AMP at all, yet they cleverly got everyone on board with this tactic. Edit: I just skimmed through this... this looks _WORSE_ than having Google show their domain. This is some of the sneakiest most deceitful garb…

Sneaky because now you don't know what server a web page is coming from? Because yes that's true, although cryptography it's maybe half true.

Sneaky because (especially for news articles), the most common web-based attack is google (or fb, etc) slurping up my information.

Now, they want to remove the remaining user interface element that says they’re spying on me!

Also, this makes it even harder to ad block their junk at the network layer (is foo.com down, or is this more amp bs?)

Re: AMP pages displaying your own domain

#243
post #223
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as if the lift of transforming HTML into AMP HTML wasn't already big enough for your average web site owner, implementing signed exchanges will be over the head of 99% of the folks building web pages on the Web Converting web pages into AMP isn't something you can automate, but supporting signed exchanges is. You need certificate authorities to support the flag and web servers support the protocol, but if this catc…

Well, it's disappointing DigiCert didn't tell Google to fuck off. I hope this never comes to something like Let's Encrypt, so the vast majority of developers can never use this. Sometimes, Google needs a gentle nudge from users saying "we don't like this" and hope they reconsider (I doubt it).

Honestly, if comcast and friends started blocking this crap by default (with an opt in for people that want to be spied on by google) I’d take back at least half the mean things I’ve said about Pai.

Re: AMP pages displaying your own domain

#244
post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You won't see AMP if you switch search engines.

Using DuckDuckGo with a backup of !g (send search to google), I don't think I've ever hit an AMP page in search results in my life. Maybe because I only use !g for really technical searches.

!s takes you to Startpage, which, if you're trying to avoid Google, gets you where you want to go by proxy.

Re: AMP pages displaying your own domain

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens if other browsers don't implement it? It seems like they'll just show CloudFlare or Google's domains, instead of the signing domain?

The behavior for browsers without support is to show the google.com/amp URL as before, along with a small html-based bar with additional information about the original domain and share intents.

> share intents

Does that mean that the Google+ button is coming back? Seriously? Why not just serve the content and leave it at that? Is the tiny bit of extra data you get from a unique "share on Facebook" URL worth it?

Re: AMP pages displaying your own domain

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It only works in Chrome. The Web has now been split in two, and you now have to use Google Chrome to be on the faster version. Google is shamefully abusing its power in several places here.

If by not using Chrome you don't end up on an AMP page, I consider that a feature.

Google is unethically abusing their power against non-Chromium browsers like Firefox. Speed matters in the eyes of users, even if we individually block AMP. See the link below for a general pattern.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...

Re: AMP pages displaying your own domain

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AMP documents don't share user data with Google, which can be trivially seen by inspecting the network events that the page generates. If the publisher chooses, they can send logging to Google Analytics, but this is not part of AMP. The typical argument otherwise is that the AMP javascript is loaded from Google's cache, however these javascript resources allow for a very long cache lifetime (1yr if the page came from…

> AMP documents don't share user data with Google, which can be trivially seen by inspecting the network events that the page generates. Is there anything preventing Google from changing this later?

No, if Google can change the way web works from day one they can change anything they want. Don't forget Google is killing imap and dns already. Why not http to?

Re: AMP pages displaying your own domain

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, this was very informative. I'm not a fan of AMP at all, but this helps me understand the reasoning a little bit better and why Google hosting the AMP cache is necessary for preserving privacy. At its root, I think my objections to AMP boil down to a few things: On a technical level: 1. It's buggy and weird on iOS. 2. I'm not convinced I care about a few seconds of loading time enough to justify the added comp…

2. How many URL's do you load in a day? My browsing history over the last 10 years averages to 417 pages per day. 2 seconds per URL is 35 days of my life... I totally want that time saved if possible.

Making everything faster won't give you more time.

Re: AMP pages displaying your own domain

#249
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Users like pages that load quickly, which amp is not a requirement for. Amp is designed to tighten googles grip on the web, nothing more.

No it isn't. It's designed to make the user experience better on sites that frequently host Google ads (and also often contain a ton of bloat, 3rd party js, poorly constructed DOMs, awful CSS, etc). The only way Google could proactively "solve" this problem was by creating a "standard", and then also offering to absorb end user traffic for sites that adopted the standard. FWIW, AMP is an open standard not solely owne…

> FWIW, AMP is an open standard not solely owned or contributed to by Google.

> https://amp.dev/

amp.dev is owned and controlled by Google. ampproject.org is owned and controlled by Google. The core AMP team are Google employees.

How can you possibly say it's not owned by Google?

Re: AMP pages displaying your own domain

#250

Let’s hope AMP, like most google products, is shut down within the next 2-3 years

What's wrong with it exactly... beside being weird. I'm not a fan of manipulating the URL the way they do with this change, but couldn't you just opt to not use AMP if you don't like it? Ideally people would develop fast sites on their own, but apparently they need the help of Google.

> but couldn't you just opt to not use AMP if you don't like it?

This is false. as a user I cannot easily opt out of using AMP

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