I don’t like AMP. I think that Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages are a bad idea, poorly executed, and almost-certainly anti-competitive.

So, I decided to join the AC (Advisory Committee) for AMP. I don’t want them surrounded with sycophants and yes-men. A few weeks ago, a bunch of the AC met in London for our first physical meeting after several exploratory video calls.

These are my impressions and highlights of the meeting. You should also read the official minutes to get a more rounded view of the issues.

I am not representing my employer while working on the AC. I do not get paid for being a member – although our host (Akamai) provided refreshments, and another member paid for lunch. These views are mine and mine alone. I will be respecting the Chatham House Rule.

AMP isn’t loved by publishers

We heard, several times, that publishers don’t like AMP. They feel forced to use it because otherwise they don’t get into Google’s news carousel – right at the top of the search results.

Some people felt aggrieved that all the hard work they’d done to speed up their sites was for nothing. They felt that they had a competitive advantage against slower publishers. That was destroyed by AMP.

My recommendation is that Google stop requiring that organisations use Google’s proprietary mark-up in order to benefit from Google’s promotion.

AMP is not accessible

There has not been a thorough accessibility review of AMP. Many of the components are not accessible.

This is legally and morally troubling. AMP need to do much better at testing accessibility. I also think that their validator should refuse to pass a page if it doesn’t meet a threshold of automatic accessibility testing.

No user research

AMP claims to be doing the best for the user. But they have published no user research about what users want, how they interact with components, or what they have difficulty with.

The launch of AMP Email highlights this. It is impossible for a publisher to use without understanding the user needs it attempts to solve.

I don’t want AMP to publish videos of users, or other identifiable information. We need to see the same sort of publication as you’d deliver to your CEO.

Without user research support, there’s no acceptable route to creating new AMP components.

AMP spreads fake news

When you visit an AMP page, your URL bar shows google.com/amp/.... – that has led to lots of extremely dubious content being shared by people who think they’re looking at an “authoritative” Google Page.

Removing the URL bar is not the answer. Users need to be able to see who is actually responsible for publishing the content they are reading. Obfuscating it damages the web ecosystem.

Perhaps Signed Exchanges are the answer?

Signed Exchanges are not the answer

Yet another Google product to solve the mess created by a different Google product!

Signed Exchanges are complicated. Basically, a website packages up a page and cryptographically signs it. An entirely different site can then serve the bundle but the browser shows the URL of the original site!

That is, I download a page from Google, but my browser says “example.com”.

It looks like Firefox and Safari won’t support this. Content Delivery Networks are worried about how much traffic it will take from them. Security experts worry about the holes in the scheme. And publishers fear losing analytics.

It’s a clever idea – and possibly really useful for a fully distributed network. But the current implementation looks like Google trying to keep users within its walled garden with no hope of escape.

Browser compatibility

When a user uses Chrome for Android to search Google, they get AMP results. When a user tries the same search in Firefox, they only get regular results. We found the same thing occurring with several other mobile browsers.

Google has effectively said “You have to use our browser on our search engine to get the fastest content written in our langauge.”

That strikes me as possibly being anti-competitive and certainly antithetical to the idea of an open and neutral web.

My top recommendations

Publish all user research Don’t allow new components to be created without a clear user story and research to support them.

Accessibly audit Don’t validate pages which can’t pass an automated a11y test

Stop the forced bundling Let users opt-out of seeing AMP pages Don’t require AMP for prominent placement Stop discriminating against non-Google browsers

Reconsider AMP4Email Lots of concerns from smaller email providers Security and archiving concerns

Work with the ecosystem rather than imposing

Conclusions

The meeting was good natured. While there were some robust discussions, the AC seemed fairly unified that Google had to seriously rework parts of the AMP project.

As I said in the meeting – if it were up to me, I’d go “Well, AMP was an interesting experiment. Now it is time to shut it down and take the lessons learned back through a proper standards process.”

I suspect that is unlikely to happen. Google shows no sign of dropping AMP. Mind you, I thought that about Google+ and Inbox, so who knows!

My personal view as advisory committee member – if AMP is to continue then it needs to become a much better citizen of the open web.