> But they might have seen the icon, and realized it means "it loads fast!", and they want it.
Imagine your country's water sources are filthy and crappy. Your tap water literally stinks - all of that because of unrestricted commercial development. Now imagine that to solve this problem, your government created a certificate mark (Aqua Model Premium, complete with a cool icon), which can be issued to bottle water companies who meet a set of water quality criteria.
People want clean drinking water, they might have seen the AMP icon, so they'll go and buy the water bottles from government-certified companies, right?
(Oh, and let's not forget the criteria are written in such way that the bottle companies can literally shit in the bottle, as long as they use government-certified shit dispensers for that.)
Or how about the government starts issuing penalties to water delivery companies and to those who pollute rivers, until the tap water again meets the AMP criteria?
It's not a perfect analogy (Google is not a government, but it kind of owns most of the web as we know it), but it's more-less how I see this situation. Google already penalizes some bloat; they could push this much further (especially for mobile searches) instead of creating a new pseudo-standard.
The point being, as a solution for bloat, AMP is at best a workaround. But as this article proves, it's not even an effective workaround - AMP pages are free to include all the usual resource-heavy crap, just through a new set of "AMP-optimized" JS libraries.
Imagine your country's water sources are filthy and crappy. Your tap water literally stinks - all of that because of unrestricted commercial development. Now imagine that to solve this problem, your government created a certificate mark (Aqua Model Premium, complete with a cool icon), which can be issued to bottle water companies who meet a set of water quality criteria.
People want clean drinking water, they might have seen the AMP icon, so they'll go and buy the water bottles from government-certified companies, right?
(Oh, and let's not forget the criteria are written in such way that the bottle companies can literally shit in the bottle, as long as they use government-certified shit dispensers for that.)
Or how about the government starts issuing penalties to water delivery companies and to those who pollute rivers, until the tap water again meets the AMP criteria?
It's not a perfect analogy (Google is not a government, but it kind of owns most of the web as we know it), but it's more-less how I see this situation. Google already penalizes some bloat; they could push this much further (especially for mobile searches) instead of creating a new pseudo-standard.
The point being, as a solution for bloat, AMP is at best a workaround. But as this article proves, it's not even an effective workaround - AMP pages are free to include all the usual resource-heavy crap, just through a new set of "AMP-optimized" JS libraries.