{"id":175820,"date":"2020-11-19T19:42:00","date_gmt":"2020-11-20T00:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2020\/11\/19\/kill-it-with-fire\/"},"modified":"2020-11-19T19:42:00","modified_gmt":"2020-11-20T00:42:00","slug":"kill-it-with-fire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2020\/11\/19\/kill-it-with-fire\/","title":{"rendered":"Kill it With Fire"},"content":{"rendered":"

In response to the anti-trust lawsuit filed against it, Google will no longer give favorable placement to media outlets that use its AMP HTML dialectt<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This is a good thing.<\/p>\n

First, AMP sucks, second, it was an invitation for Google to violate user privacy and extend its ad and search monopolies, and third, AMP sucks:<\/p>\n

Four years after offering special placement<\/a> in a \u201ctop stories carousel\u201d in search results to entice publishers to use a format it created for mobile pages, called AMP, Google announced last week that it will end that preferential treatment in the spring<\/a>. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe will prioritize pages with great page experience, whether implemented using AMP or any other web technology, as we rank the results,\u201d Google said in a blog post. <\/p>\n

The company had indicated in 2018 that it would drop the preference eventually. Last week\u2019s announcement of a concrete timeline comes less than a month after the Department of Justice called Google a \u201cmonopoly gatekeeper to the internet\u201d in a lawsuit<\/a> alleging antitrust violations and as pressure mounts<\/a> on officials in the European Union, which has already fined Google more than $9 billion for antitrust violations. <\/p>\n

\u201cI did always think AMP posed antitrust concerns,\u201d said Sally Hubbard, author of the book \u201cMonopolies Suck\u201d and an antitrust expert with the Open Markets Institute. \u201cIt\u2019s, \u2018If you want to show up on the top of the search results, you have to play by our rules, you have to use AMP.\u2019 \u201d <\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026 <\/p>\n

Whatever prompted the timing of the change, some news sites are relieved that they won\u2019t have to keep using Google\u2019s preferred mobile standard. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe are encouraged to see Google beginning to outline a path away from AMP,\u201d Robin Berjon, head of data governance at The New York Times, said in a written statement in response to questions from The Markup. \u201cIt\u2019s important Google addresses the core challenge with the format, so that it is no longer a requirement for news products and performance ranking.\u201d <\/p>\n

News publishers and others have been griping about AMP<\/a> for years. Some called it Google\u2019s attempt to exert the same kind of control over the larger web that Facebook exerts over posts in its closed system. <\/p>\n

That\u2019s because AMP is more than just a set of formatting rules. Once a website sets up an AMP page, Google copies it and stores it on Google servers. When users click on the link for an AMP page in search results\u2014or its news reading app\u2014Google serves up that cached version from its servers. <\/p>\n

\u201cAMP keeps users within Google\u2019s domain and diverts traffic away from other websites for the benefit of Google,\u201d read a 2018 open letter<\/a> signed by more than 700 technologists and advocates. \u201cAt a scale of billions of users, this has the effect of further reinforcing Google\u2019s dominance of the Web.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026 <\/p>\n

In an analysis<\/a> published by The Markup earlier this year of 15,269 popular searches on Google, we found that AMP-enabled results appeared often, taking up more than 13 percent of the first results page. Google took another 41 percent of the page for its own products. <\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026 <\/p>\n

As the news industry struggled over the past decade, with dropping newspaper subscription rates and ad revenue and plateauing online traffic leading to massive job losses<\/a>, many publishers adopted AMP in hopes that it would help their bottom lines. Most of the roughly 2,000 members of the News Media Alliance, a trade organization that represents newspapers, use it. <\/p>\n

\u201cThey don\u2019t really feel there is a choice,\u201d said Danielle Coffey, the group\u2019s general counsel and senior vice president. <\/p>\n

Her opinion is widely shared. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe essentially have a coercion by Google upon publishers to allow people to host their content,\u201d said Andrew Betts, a former member of the Technical Architecture Group at the international web standards organization W3C, who has written about his concerns with AMP<\/a>. \u201cAnd publishers who decide they don\u2019t want that to happen because they want to serve their own content, thanks very much, will not ever appear in the first set of search results.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

And AMP sometimes causes issues that publishers lack the power to fix on their own. In one prominent example, publishers discovered there was no way to allow users to opt out of having their data sold, a requirement under the California Consumer Privacy Act, which went into effect this year.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Talk about burying the lede.<\/p>\n

AMP allows Google to take control of user data from media outlets.<\/p>\n

Now we know why Google pushed it so hard, they wanted to slurp up more user data.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In response to the anti-trust lawsuit filed against it, Google will no longer give favorable placement to media outlets that use its AMP HTML dialectt. This is a good thing. First, AMP sucks, second, it was an invitation for Google to violate user privacy and extend its ad and search monopolies, and third, AMP sucks: …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[608,365,364,367,479,366],"class_list":["post-175820","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-advertising","tag-business","tag-evil","tag-internet","tag-monopoly","tag-privacy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175820"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=175820"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175820\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=175820"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=175820"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=175820"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}