Seems a little unlikely, given that Google Analytics is already on 50-60% of the Internet and many mobile apps. Analytics is a much more effective tracking mechanism than AMP.
The docs explain that "AMP analytics is specifically designed to measure once and report to many". Google's not trying to drive out other players, they're making sure they run the table.
This way they see every request, and learn a lot about their rivals.
Note also that the AMP ad spec warns that there are major changes to come.
My point elsewhere in this thread is that Google already knows all about their rivals. They're already seeing every HTTP request via Analytics, DoubleClick, Chrome, etc. They're already seeing which of their competitors are in use on which pages via the crawl. While I didn't know of any project to join & analyze this data while I was at Google (indeed, joining log sources required high-up approval because of the privacy implications), doing so would be technically trivial. They certainly don't need to launch a whole new product to get it.
I also believe the stated reasons for the project—to make the mobile web faster–are genuine. I believe that is the sincere motivation of many of the engineers working on it.
But the ultimate purpose of this project is to preserve the status quo around ads and tracking. Bloat has made the current situation on mobile devices untenable, and people are turning to blockers as a solution. AMP is a way to get rid of the bloat without getting rid of the surveillance. Google bets (correctly, in my opinion) that people won't care about being monitored if the performance problems go away.
Controlling the platform that does this will be useful to Google in the long run. For example, Google will be able to blacklist ad networks that don't meet their specifications. And Google can be sure theirs will always be the fastest game in town.
I think this is a completely unfair characterization of AMP.
AMP's speedup doesn't come purely from blocking tracker JS, AMP acts like a framework, like any other, to allow people to leverage best practices for fast rendering, managing all resource loading asynchronously, preventing relayouts during rendering, etc. Most frontend developers, especially at many small publishers, simply don't adhere to good HTML/CSS/JS practices.
If the future is a future where everyone runs blockers, then you get some of the benefits, you also likely break legitimate websites as we have already seen, and you make the blocker vendors themselves into surveillance platforms that sell analytics and extract profit from those who want to punch holes in the blocker. Who do you trust more, Google or AdBlock, Inc? But if the future instead, is that people don't even use Web browsers to read web sites, but used silo'ed Facebook or Apple readers, then how does that benefit anyone? Prior to AMP, the mobile web itself was facing a crisis of bloat.
AMP allows publishing to stay federated and work in browsers, delivering performance that makes it less likely people will leave the Web. I don't see how it's any different than say, Twitter Bootstrap in that regard. If this effort gets people to trim down their mobile pages in order to get better search ranking, by drawing attention to it, we may finally get some traction on an issue that's gone mostly under the radar.
It is in Google's best interest to ensure the open web continues to be viable, as Google Search won't even exist if there is no mobile web to index and everything is published on Facebook or iTunes. Google's overall goal over the years has been to increase web usage, as it's core service relies on it. I compare the Web to logging a forest. You need to keep planting trees and be a good caretaker, else the forest may die out. Many other good projects have been released purely for improvement purposes (e.g. Pagespeed Insights).
I have to imagine that it's more better accurate to get raw numbers at the transfer point rather than browser-reported ones. This also allows them to get stats for no-js browsers, too.
Right, but my point is that between Google Analytics, Chrome, and Doubleclick, Google is already tracking basically every pageview on the Internet. There's no need to introduce yet another product to accomplish this.
I think a far more likely explanation is to take Google's statement that they want to accelerate the mobile web at face value. When people view pages faster, they view more of them, which in turn means that they search more, they click on more ads, and Google makes more money. This makes far more sense to me as a direct revenue play than as a surveillance/tracking play.
I think a lot of it is a response to Facebook's instant articles too. They were beginning to build up a story where the fastest version of the Web is via the Facebook app, not the browser and not search. It doesn't take a huge amount more before that story becomes a threat to search.
Oh, absolutely. This is 99% about keeping users inside of Google's walled garden (reserving 1% because cramforce seems like a good guy and genuinely interested in giving mobile users a faster, lighter-weight experience).
