As Antitrust Pressure Mounts, Google To Pull Back Benefit to News Sites That Adopted Its Preferred MobileTechnology

Four years after offering special placement in a "top stories carousel" in search results to entice publishers to use a format it created for mobile pages, called AMP, Google announced last week that it will end that preferential treatment in the spring. "We will prioritize pages with great page experience, whether implemented using AMP or any other web technology, as we rank the results," Google said in a blog post. From a report: The company had indicated in 2018 that it would drop the preference eventually. Last week's announcement of a concrete timeline comes less than a month after the Department of Justice called Google a "monopoly gatekeeper to the internet" in a lawsuit alleging antitrust violations and as pressure mounts on officials in the European Union, which has already fined Google more than $9 billion for antitrust violations. "I did always think AMP posed antitrust concerns," said Sally Hubbard, author of the book "Monopolies Suck" and an antitrust expert with the Open Markets Institute. "It's, 'If you want to show up on the top of the search results, you have to play by our rules, you have to use AMP.'" Google spokesperson Meghann Farnsworth did not address the timing of the change but said AMP is not dead, saying the company is "fully committed to AMP as a technology." She said AMP continues to be required for certain features that "are not technically possible" without it, such as "swipe to visit" in Google Images, and that it's "preferred" in the "for you" feed in Google's news reading app, Google Discover.

How is this a monopoly?

[Kitkoan]

I know Google said they will give prefered treatment to AMP sites and all, but their own study shows that it was a moot issue.

From the article: "In an analysis published by The Markup earlier this year of 15,269 popular searches on Google, we found that AMP-enabled results appeared often, taking up more than 13 percent of the first results page"

13 percent of the first results page. 9 results on page means a whole 2 links were for AMP sites, and 7 for non-AMP sites.

How is 2 out of 9 monopolizing?

Re:

[DaveV1.0]

You may find this informative [medium.com]

Re:

[Kitkoan]

Then don't use AMP. As the study showed, only 2 of 9 links used AMP. That means 7 of the 9 sites that did show didn't use AMP, and not using AMP didn't seem to remove them from the first page.

I could have seen the issue if more than 50% of the links were AMP sites, or if Google wasn't allowing non-AMP sites to be shown (and trying to force AMP to be THE option). But as is shown currently, not using AMP doesn't seem to be hurting anyone.

It seems more like AMP is an "open standard" that's more dead in the wat

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[sjames]

Those who don't learn history are doomed to repeat it. Way back in the before time, Palm proposed WAP to enhance access to web sites. Unsurprisingly, within a year or two it went down the cWAPper. Palm wasn't far behind.

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[DaveV1.0]

The monopoly suit is based on giving preference in search results to those that use AMP. By definition, that is using it's position as the most used search engine to promote another of it's products in a different area which is anti-competitive behavior and THAT is the basis of the complaint.

When a company uses it's dominance in a market to encourage or force use of other of it's products in other markets by punishing those who choose not to use the latter product in the former market, they are using the

Re:

[lexman098]

To most of his points I was thinking "good". I don't want to load bloated pages with a "custom user experience" full of shit I didn't request to see.

The only seemingly-valid criticism (that he keeps repeating) is that amp pages have to be served from Google's cache. This is apparently [globenewswire.com] not true. Google of course provides an easy to use cache, but it's an open standard and you don't have to use their cache servers.

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[sound+vision]

The proposed monopoly is in Google Search. By my count it's 1 of 2 usable search engines, so whether that's a monopoly is arguable, but it's closer than 2 out of 9.

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[Actually, I do RTFA]

Most clicks occur to the first two responses, not the first two pages of responses. That's like saying "MS never had a monopoly, only 13% of software was Windows only. How can 13% be a monopoly."

Re: How is this a monopoly?

[fbobraga]

...and AMP plays not very well with paywalls

Good riddance

[brunes69]

Anything that helps to get rid of the data-harvesting, user experience breaking, bug-ridden pile of dogshit that is AMP faster is good news in my books.

Re: Good riddance

[sl3xd]

AMP sites are universally broken for every browser I visit with. It seems the developers have a mantra of âoeAMP isnâ(TM)t done until [safari|silk|anything other than official Android] wonâ(TM)t run.â

I realize many mobile sites have a severe problem of megabytes of tracking scripts for advertisers, but putting one of the worldâ(TM)s largest advertisers (Google) in the loop for everything isnâ(TM)t an improvement.

Re: Good riddance

[fbobraga]

AMP sites suck here too

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[BeatriceFatee]

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"Pull back" ?!

[greytree]

Does "pull back" mean bringing back the benefits or restricting them ?

How does anyone reading this headline work that out ?

FFS, Slashdot "editors", if you don't like your job GIVE IT UP.

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[Actually, I do RTFA]

"Pull back benefits" means "no longer supply benefits." In this case, it means removing the PageRank boost you get for supplying an AMP site. It's beyond obvious (esp. if you read the summary.) Since you have trouble reading a whole three sentences: TL;DR - Good thing happened, Google evil plan slowed down.

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[greytree]

"Pull back" means "Return to supplying" just as much as it means "No longer supply".
Thanks for the TLDR, but I do not need it because I read the story. That is not the point, as I think you well know.

The point is that if reading a summary is required to explain the meaning of a headline THEN THE HEADLINE IS FARKED and an editor doing their job would know that.

Let it die

[kurkosdr]

Good, let AMP die. Websites will serve you a stripped-down AMP version of the website to get the boost in Google Search rankings, but the moment you try to interact with the page in any way (such as upvote a comment or click to see more comments), they will redirect you to the regular (non-AMP) version, making the whole point of AMP useless. Ideally, websites would not overload their pages (mobile or desktop version) with useless scripts and auto-playing videos, and instead only use the amount of javascript

Well

[DarkRookie2]

Its a yoctometer step in teh right direction at least