IMO:

Any protocol or mechanism written by Google is surely to give it more control over the Internet, hence advertising and hence revenue.

Not only AMP, but HTTP 2, QUIC, DNS over HTTPS are all things that Google wanted to have control over. I certainly hope the free internet moves into Tor and the rest of the dark web, and is certainly not indexable by Google.

Also, stop using Google Chrome if you wish to do the web a favor.

I hate AMP. It is just a tech to give google more control. Anything to helps kill it off is a good thing. It is possible to create pages that load fast on mobile without it.

This won't save them, the local newspaper is doomed. Local papers have always functioned as a sort of news aggregator. They aggregate local news together with national news and serve you that as a sort of localized feed of information. It's similar to Reddit; the NYT and national news are like /r/worldnews (purely in topic, not content) and local papers are like your city's subreddit. Letters to the Editor are like comments.

Theyre actually so similar that Reddit et al are killing them. Reddit even often has local reporting from Redditors; I find out about lots of happenings directly from Redditors.

I think national news will likely survive in some form because of the investigation required (and the legitimacy granted by an organization like the NYT reporting on it), but local papers are going to go the way of the pay phone.

Google gives special preference to AMP sites in search, images and google news. Google is also removing non-AMP URLs from Google News. fucking everything is loaded from their servers nowadays

The media cycle is a money grab anyway you slice.I couldnt careless about the misfortune of any news medium while things are in the current state. Everyone of them prioritize their news coverage based on clicks. 2020 has been the gold rush for all media big or small capitalizing on a nation that is falling apart.A complete overhaul of media is needed. Not this tid for tat. Put some energy in the places that matter.

Google will just point out than any website can block their scraping with a robots.txt and they will just say they will stop using news if they are forced to pay.

And from one of the articles linked:

> But the immediate boost in readership won’t offset the virus’s brutal impact on the pillars holding up the business, publishing executives say. Local advertising spending could fall this year by at least a quarter, amounting to a decline of more than $30 billion, according to one estimate.

The issue is more than online advertisements aren't very lucrative (although Google's monopoly in that area could play a role in that and gives them some power to retaliate).

Frankly, I just don't see the general population willing to pay as much for news as it did in the past. The big stories will be available for free somewhere and even local news can be found on Twitter/social media.

Welcome this. I switched over to FF only because of AMP.

I still remember reading article about how Google tried their first quasi AMP service around 2005 or something like that

As far as I've read they were serving pages to people with other people's data like "Hello, {username}" and stuff, generally security nightmare.

Unfortunely I do not remember how it was named...

edit.

>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Web_Accelerator

>Google Web Accelerator sent requests for web pages, except for secure web pages (HTTPS), to Google, which logged these requests. Some web pages embedded personal information in these page requests.

>Google received and temporarily cached cookie data that your computer sent with webpage requests in order to improve performance.

>Google crawled every web page it came across leading it to inadvertently deleting web pages.[1]

>In order to speed up delivery of content, Google Web Accelerator sometimes retrieved webpage content that the user did not request, and stored it in the Google Web Accelerator cache[2]. Some law experts and IT authors affirmed that Google would "combine personal and clickstream data with existing search history data contained in Google's own cookie"[3]

>Google Web Accelerator is no longer available for, or supported by, Google as of January 20, 2008. As of 2008 the Google Web Accelerator is not compatible with Firefox 3.0. Google Web Accelerator is still available for download from other websites. The Labs experiment launched in 2005 was discontinued and no longer supported by Google, since January 2009

AMP is bad. I’m not sure if AMP policed by the FTC is better.

It's super weird that news aggregators aren't directly funding OC. How does "news" work when most of the content creators go out of business? (Edit: Huh. I guess we already know, because that's exactly what happened.)

Compare news to other OC, like books, music, video, podcasts, and apps.

Musicians get paid. Kinda. (I'm not smart enough to figure out if Apple/Beats is some kind of label, meaning underwriting (?) OC.) And music videos definitely get ad revenue sharing (YouTube & Vevo).

Book authors get paid. Kinda. Isn't one of Amazon's properties now an imprint, or publisher, or whatever that segment's underwriters (?) called?

Video definitely gets paid. Streaming, snippets (Vine and now TikTok style), vlogging, sports, episodic TV, movies, miniseries (Netflix), etc. EVERYONE is paying for OC video. It's a strategic differentiator.

Podcasters get paid. (Per power laws distribution.) Like video, EVERYONE is trying to get into the game, funding OC.

Ditto apps.

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So why is "news" different?

If I was Apple, today, I'd set up some kind of huge trust with the sole purpose of funding any and all new "journalism" OC. No strings attached.

I'd open the flood gates for funding OC. Huge, big, and small. Copy every kind of philanthropic funding idea. Have a huge fund for traditional news organizations serving int'l, national, state, and local markets. Do whatever Corp for Public Broadcasting does for PBS. Dump money into other trusts funding OC, directly or thru partnerships. One off grants for indie bloggers and investigative reporters. Recurring funding for activism style journalism. I'd reinvent "new bureaus" to recreate "embedded" journalism, so reporters can get paid to cover city hall.

I'd create infrastructure for fund raising. So other listener supported media can more easily replicate the success of KEXP.

I'd figure out a "startup school" incubator so that wannabe working journalists and bloggers learn how to get paid. Music and film and writing communities have their own ecosystems of conventions, workshops, meetups. Fund the same for journalism.

And just like the new style purpose driven philanthropists, I'd have some kind of metrics. Internal and external. Rewarding both effort and successes. Imagine funding an arts critic, say someone(s) reporting on the ballet and dance community. Their victory conditions would be very different than someone reporting on current events.

Edit: Two more ideas: Endowments for schools of journalism. Create and fund more awards, prizes.

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It's painfully unobvious to me why journalism, reporting isn't being funded. Google and Facebook benefit tremendously, economically, from OC.

Are these parasites worried they'll kill their hosts?

Why suggest Apple? I dunno. Two reasons.

It just seems to me that they'd understand best how to benefit from PBS style shoutouts like "This programing was made possible thru the generous support of Apple Community Trust and other supporters just like you."

And like privacy, their hands-off relationship with journalism OC would be a terrific "brand laddering" strategy that Facebook (Zuck) and Google (Page, Brin) are unable to replicate, because they are constitutionally incapable of ceding control. Seeing how Bezos seems to have managed Wash post, future Bezos may have something closer to enlightened altruism.

I can kinda imagine Jack Dorsey creating a trust for OC. His recent giving pledge org is impressive. But given Twitter's continued schizophrenia, I just don't think he has a compelling (reality based) thesis or worldview for journalism. And insert the cliche about asking someone who created the problem to then turnaround and fix the problem.

Bonus third reason: Maybe Apple would be better are coaxing journalists to optimize for Apple News. Something like WWDC for written OC.

Thoughts? Ideas? Reactions?

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