I'm glad AMP's weaknesses are finally gaining attention and making their rounds. Google should not be allowed to steal publishers' traffic and strong-arm them into going along with it.
Controversial question: At what point would Google start to be considered an antitrust issue? I know the EU has made some noise about it, but I'm a bit surprised I haven't heard more about it here in the U.S.
In all fairness, lyric sites were terrible. Slow, riddled with ads, and sometimes incorrect. While Google's lyrics are a great service to the user, they're at the top of search and displayed inline. There's no reason to go to lyric sites anymore.
My biggest fear is Structured Data and AMP. With Structure Data, you volunteer your most valuable data in a format Google can easily consume and adapt to its own needs - all so you can get better page rankings. When Google introduces its own service in the same market - just like lyrics - you're effectively cut off from your audience. And with AMP, you don't have to wait for Google to siphon your traffic - you're volunteering.
They're also republishing peoples' artistic creations with no permission - same goes for "Band - Topic" on youtube. Many people that publish their music through epublishers have no idea that youtube will monetize the (audio-only) video uploads of their songs, and get hit with takedown notices if they try to upload it on their own. It happened to me, and we had to really hammer the intermediary epublisher to get youtube to reupload our own video (!).
Edit: on top of that, the video that got taken down was an iphone video of people dancing to a song playing over a stereo - kudos to how accurate their detection is, but goddamn!
Thanks, I appreciate your view! That's how it strikes me as well; that Google provides unparalleled sticks and carrots towards publishers that will end up undoing those same publishers, while they (publishers) volunteer to go along and aid in the process! (Maybe they have little choice in the race to get traffic?)
In other words, Google seems like a very powerful gatekeeper of content that ends up consuming the content providers. Smacks of an abuse of their position.
And if lyric sites hosted original content, I might have felt for them. I think Google is overreaching in many ways, but not in instances like this where the content itself is such a commodity.
