Browser maker Brave and web search service DuckDuckGo have both targeted Google’s controversial web publishing framework, AMP.
Brave on Tuesday introduced a feature called De-AMP that allows those using the Brave browser to bypass Google-hosted AMP pages and directly access publisher content on standard web pages.
De-AMP will rewrite fetched web pages that link to AMP pages so that their links point to the publisher’s version of those pages. Brave’s browser uses a modified version of Google Chrome’s Chromium, which monitors when AMP pages are loaded and stops them before they can be rendered. Doing so would prevent Google’s AMP scripts and images from being fetched and executed, while also reducing the ad giant’s ability to see web traffic and understand where it’s going.
And in Brave 1.40 (current version is 1.37.116), the plan is to extend Brave’s debounce functionality to detect when an AMP URL will be accessed and direct users to the standard version of that page.
DuckDuckGo said Tuesday that its apps and extensions are now resistant to Google AMP. Users who load or share a Google AMP page through DuckDuckGo’s iOS, Android or Mac app or using its Chrome or Firefox extension will see the publisher’s regular web page instead of the Google AMP version.
As Google describes it, AMP is a method of creating web pages using a subset of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS along with unique tags and a CDN for caching. Google claims that its goal is to provide a better user experience because AMP pages load faster than pages built using standard web technologies.
Google’s competitors and critics see things differently. In the years after AMP was announced in 2015, the technology was derided as sending web traffic to a cache on Google’s servers, rather than to sites implementing AMP pages, and stripping publishers of their power.
Texas and other U.S. states filed an antitrust lawsuit in December 2020 accusing Google of anticompetitive behavior in digital advertising, describing AMP as an attempt to beat “header bidding,” a multi-ad exchange fair Participating in an automated ad auction that allegedly threatens Google ad revenue.
“Specifically, Google made AMP unable to execute JavaScript in headers, which prevented publishers from using header bidding,” the third amended complaint states.
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Google has denied the claims, insisting that AMP exists to help improve the web.
“Google’s engineers worked with publishers and other tech companies to design AMP to help web pages load faster and improve the user experience on mobile devices—rather than hurting headline bidding,” the company responded in a blog post. Third Amendment appeal.
Google search contact Danny Sullivan also said“AMP doesn’t and doesn’t cause pages to rank higher in search.” He added that while AMP used to be an eligibility requirement for top story carousels in mobile searches, that practice ended last year.
Still, rivals like Brave and DuckDuckGo — whose dissatisfaction with Google’s privacy practices hit 50 million monthly active users and nearly 100 million daily query rates, respectively — have shown little enthusiasm for AMP.
In a blog post, Brave privacy product manager and engineer Shivan Kaul Sahib and senior director of privacy Peter Snyder argue that AMP will harm online privacy and security while increasing Google’s monopoly on the web.
They argue that AMP provides Google with more data about what people are doing on the web, convincing users that they are interacting with publisher sites when they are actually interacting with Google’s servers and linking the web to Push to Google’s infrastructure and technology.
Additionally, Sahib and Snyder argue in a footnote that Core Web Vitals is another performance scoring system Google has adopted for privileged page placement — AMP pages score high — just to try to show regulators “openness.”
DuckDuckGo makes a similar argument.
DuckDuckGo said: “AMP technology is not good for privacy because it enables Google to track users more (which is already a whole lot).” via twitter. “And, Google’s use of AMP further cements its monopoly, forcing publishers to use the technology by prioritizing AMP links in search and supporting Google Ads on AMP pages.” ®
