Why Brave and DuckDuckGo are cracking down on Google’s AMP
De-AMPing the web
What’s AMP?
Google first introduced AMPin 2015 with an aim to make pages and articles load faster on mobile. The company said it’ll “dramatically improve the performance of the mobile web.”
It used cached copies of pages stored on CDNs (Content Delivery Network) to quickly bring up the page when a user tries to access it.
While Google had said an open-source group is in control of the standard, it was always touted as the standard to compete against Facebook’s Instant Articles and Apple News.
Over the years, AMP has faced a lot of criticism, including concerns overGoogle tightening its dominance over the webandreduced ad revenue for the original publisheras it didn’t allow customized ad units, sponsorships, or pop-up ads.
AMP’s criticism
In the past few years,publishers have started moving away from AMP. Notably, last year, Twitter stopped sending users to AMP pages when they clicked on links on the platform, instead redirecting them tothe native or mobile versions of those pages.
AMP was also a point of discussion ina 2020 anticompetitive lawsuitwith the plaintiff arguing the tech makes it harder for publishers to participate in ad auctions on non-Google platforms.
Last year, Googleissued an update to its page ranking algorithmsaying AMP pages won’t get preferential treatment.
While the Big G has always held the stance that AMP makes page loading faster,criticshave said that there are simple ways, like tuning your website, to serve up pages more quickly without resorting to a whole new protocol.
So what are Brave and DuckDuckGo doing?
Earlier this week, Brave publisheda blog postsaying it’s releasing a new feature called De-AMP that’ll redirect you to the publisher’s original page, instead of an AMP-based link.
The feature is available in Nightly and Beta versions of the browser, and will be enabled by default in the upcoming 1.38 Desktop and Android versions. The firm said it’s working on porting these functions to its iOS browser at the moment.
A day later, privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo posted on Twitter that its apps and extensions will redirect users to publishers’ non-AMP pages when they click on links in search results.
What’s their reasoning behind this?
Brave came out swinging against Google’s AMP technology, describing it as harmful to user privacy and bad for security. It also emphasized that the framework is designed to push Google’s control over the web:
“AMP encourages more of the Web to be served from Google’s servers, under Google’s control and arbitrary non-standards. It also allows Google to require pages to be built in ways that benefit Google’s advertising systems.”
DuckDuckGo highlighted similar points and said that AMP helps the search giant “further entrench its monopoly.”
In response, Google public search liaison, Danny Sullivan, said AMP is not required for pages to rank better in search results.
A Google spokesperson brushed off accusations by Brave and DuckDuckGo:
This is not the first attempt at thwarting AMP either. There are manyFirefoxandChromeextensions that help you redirect to original publisher links. However, new restrictions by Brave and DuckDuckGo might make other browsers and search engine providers think about their strategy about AMP.
For users, AMP pages have been often a pain in the neck in terms of website and article formatting. Redirecting to the original URL will mostly solve that problem. But this process should be fast. If DuckDuckGo and Brave’s tech makes things slower for them, they’d hate it as much as AMP. So it better be good.
Story byIvan Mehta
Ivan covers Big Tech, India, policy, AI, security, platforms, and apps for TNW. That’s one heck of a mixed bag. He likes to say “Bleh.“Ivan covers Big Tech, India, policy, AI, security, platforms, and apps for TNW. That’s one heck of a mixed bag. He likes to say “Bleh.”
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