“Don’t be evil” my foot.

Sarah Gooding recently argued that “AMP Has Irreparably Damaged Publishers' Trust in Google-led Initiatives”. She says so because, during a recent developers summit, two Google technologies played again the part of the biggest bad elephants in the room.

One is FLoC, the controversial initiative opposed by many major tech organizations for (at least) ALL the reasons I already reported.

The main defendant on stage, however, was that equally bad Google “technology” known as AMP, this time thanks to an ongoing complaint against Google, that in summary claims that

“Google falsely told publishers that adopting AMP would enhance load times, even though the company’s employees knew that it only improved the “median of performance” and actually loaded slower than some speed optimization techniques publishers had been using. [The complaint] alleges that AMP pages brought 40% less revenue to publishers [also at least partly a result of Google’s throttling] the load time of non-AMP ads by giving them artificial one-second delays in order to give Google AMP a ‘nice comparative boost.'"

Not bad for the main search engine and advertising broker of the Web, isn’t it?

That “nice comparative bust” came at an enormous cost to publishers who were unwilling to adopt AMP, and for no real reason at all: “Think for a moment about the cost of that.", they said, and not just for those publishers, also to every user of what should be a really open and fair platform.

How, exactly, this cost happened is explained in Gooding’s post. Here, please just allow me to be pissed off, as one of those publishers. “Don’t be evil”, my foot.