Google may not have intended any deeper meaning by announcing its new instant publishing product, AMP, at Sadelle's, a giant New York City bagel haven. But as I sat there listening to details over bagels and coffee, I couldn't help but think that in the not too distant past, someone sitting down to breakfast here would likely have done so with a newspaper in their hands. Instead, we sat with laptops and smartphones, listening to yet another tech giant explain its plans to change the media industry forever.

In just the last few months, Facebook has launched Instant Articles, Twitter has launched Moments, Apple has launched Apple News, and even Amazon has begun giving away The Washington Post for free to Prime subscribers. Even before Google joins the fray, it's clear that in the future, tech companies—not publishers—will be the chief distributors of the news we consume.

'This is about making sure the World Wide Web is not the World Wide Wait.' Richard Gingras, Google

Google's AMP, short for Accelerated Mobile Pages Project, is a continuation of that trend, though it takes a different tack from Apple and Facebook's platform-based approach. Google's home, after all, is the web, and AMP aims to ensure that web content loads just as instantly, and looks just as sleek as it would in a native app. "This is about the World Wide Web," said Google's head of news Richard Gingras. "This is about making sure the World Wide Web is not the World Wide Wait."

That end goal is not unlike that of Facebook's Instant Articles, which allows publishers like The New York Times and Buzzfeed to publish stories directly to Facebook, so users never have to click out of Facebook to view an article. Stories load 10 times faster. The main difference with AMP, being Google, is that it's open source. While Facebook is onboarding publishers one by one, leaving others to wonder how (and how often) their stories will appear in News Feed, Google is opening this format to all publishers. What's more, it's opening its code base on Github, allowing other technologists to help develop the code.

As Gingras put it, AMP is "a deal-less environment." There are no favored nations there; everyone can participate.

That said, Google has been working with a select group of publishers to test AMP, including some, like Buzzfeed, who have also collaborated on Instant Articles. Dao Nguyen, BuzzFeed's publisher, says she doesn't see the two products as competitive. "It's completely different," she said. "This is the web."

Though Google announced AMP today, Gingras says the new format won't be live until "a later date." At that point, people who Google, say, Taylor Swift on the mobile web will see a carousel of stories toward the top of their results, all with clear images and headlines. Click on a story and the content, image, and advertisements, all load instantly and simultaneously, so a slow-loading ad won't cause a page to suddenly scroll up or down. That's because AMP knows exactly where the ad will appear, so it knows the exact dimensions it requires, so ads don't have to re-layout as they load. Users can swipe through to see more articles, which load just as instantly.

Pulling Rank

The question, of course, when AMP opens to the public is how this new format will impact publishers' search rank. Gingras said Google will not privilege certain formats, like AMP, over others, and that publishers can try to maximize performance on their own, if they so choose. That said, one signal that factors heavily into Search Rank is speed, which could give the super-speedy AMP stories a de facto advantage.

It will also be interesting to see how Facebook responds to the news. After all, an article that is AMP compatible will show up instantly on Facebook, according to Melissa Bell, co-founder of Vox.com and vice president of growth and analytics for Vox Media, which is an early AMP tester. This could help publishers surface content on Facebook faster without having to be part of Facebook's walled garden.

And faster is what matters, Gingras says, because, "Anything less than instant simply shows a degradation and decline in engagement." The hope among publishers is that faster, cleaner content on the web will drive engagement. Attention spans on the web are short, after all—there's always something else to read.

One surprise beneficiary of AMP may be Twitter. While it's not a publisher per se, it's becoming an increasingly important player in news, most recently with the launch of its Moments feature, which makes news easier to follow on Twitter by organizing Tweets in a chronological, coherent timeline. Now, Twitter will automatically load any articles that are compatible with AMP as AMP files, meaning they will benefit from the same speed inside the Twitter app.

Technically, of course, Google has always played a role in deciding what news is important. Facebook and Twitter, too. But now, more than ever, these platforms are not only determining what news matters to us, they're determining the best way to present and publish it, as well. And as they do, the media industry will increasingly look to these companies for evidence of what works and respond accordingly, changing the way we read the news—and eat our breakfast—forever.