Each Courageous and DuckDuckGo have taken goal at Google’s Accelerated Cell Pages (AMP), both blocking Google’s monitoring or permitting customers to bypass AMP instantly and go to the precise residence pages themselves.
Courageous stated this week that the corporate is implementing a brand new coverage, known as “De-AMP,” which is able to rewrite hyperlinks and URLs to stop customers from vising AMP pages and as a substitute direct them to the writer’s web site. In instances the place that’s not doable, De-AMP will merely step in and do the redirecting itself. The brand new characteristic is rolling out on Courageous’s Nightly and Beta variations and might be enabled by default in Courageous 1.38 for the desktop and Android.
DuckDuckGo took an identical strategy. “Whenever you load or share a Google AMP web page anyplace from DuckDuckGo apps (iOS/Android/Mac) or extensions (Firefox/Chrome), the unique writer’s webpage might be used instead of the Google AMP model,” the corporate stated in a Tuesday tweet.
As a writer, a web site like PCWorld.com advantages from letting Google’s algorithms push a selected story to a large viewers. However the tradeoff is much like how an unpaid intern works for “publicity,” with another person benefiting from their labor. Since Google serves the web page, it doesn’t essentially serve the writer’s adverts, robbing them of earnings, and doesn’t embody all the navigational components {that a} web site could present to encourage readers to dive down additional.
Browser builders like Courageous additionally level out that serving up AMP pages lets Google host the web page, format it, and determine easy methods to body the story. “AMP is certainly one of many Google methods to additional monopolize the Net, and construct a Net the place customers serve Google, as a substitute of internet sites serving customers,” Courageous’s privateness supervisor, Shivan Sahib, and its senior director of privateness, Peter Snyder, have written.
Courageous’s Sahib and Snyder have additionally famous that customers aren’t served nicely by AMP, both; as a result of the web page is hosted by Google, customers could develop into confused about what web site they’re interacting with. Courageous has additionally contested that Google’s AMP pages can load extra slowly than different publishers’ pages.
Google, for its half, has slowly moved away from AMP to prioritize what it calls Net Tales. In December, Google additionally launched Bento, a part library that permits AMP parts for use inside non-AMP pages.
In an announcement, Google stated it disagreed with the “allegations” put ahead by the opposite firms. “These allegations are deceptive, conflate various totally different internet initiatives and requirements, and repeat various false claims,” a Google spokesperson stated in an announcement. “AMP is an open supply framework that was collaboratively developed with publishers, tech firms, and Google as a approach to assist internet content material load quicker–on the time it was created, it took 19 seconds on common to load a cellular webpage on a 3G connection. Right this moment, AMP continues to be a useful approach for web sites and publishers–particularly these with out giant improvement groups– to simply create nice internet experiences.”
This story was up to date at 5:14 PM with feedback from Google.