There is no doubt — never was any doubt — that an encrypted web is qualitatively better than an unencrypted web on so many different levels. The question is how we get there. The question is one of intent.
Where Let’s Encrypt takes a meaningful, collaborative, inclusive, and useful approach to encrypting the web, Google leads with its elbows, resorting to coercion in an attempt to force an encrypted web. Where Let’s Encrypt provides a free, automated, and open certificate authority (CA), Google insists on branding unencrypted websites with a virtual Scarlet Letter — a big red “X” over the padlock icon in its Chrome browser URL bar. Where Let’s Encrypt’s motivation is one of public service, Google’s motivation is to protect its online surveillance and advertising hegemony.
Google demands faster mobile pages
In October 2015, Google announced its Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project. AMP is an open source project that loads stripped-down versions of website pages to improve load times on mobile devices. If a website supports AMP, the stripped-down page will automatically appear in Google’s search results. Alternatively, the AMP version of a page (if supported) can be forced to display by appending /amp/ to the URL.
To use AMP, publishers must follow a strict technical specification and, when properly implemented, editorial content loads before advertisements on AMP pages and ads don’t automatically resize when the page is scrolled.
AMP is a subset of HTML and publishers must use the AMP JavaScript library — no other JavaScript is allowed. Resources including images, video, analytics, and the like must be loaded using AMP components.
Launched mostly as a competitive response to Facebook’s Instant Articles, Google’s senior director of news and social products, Richard Gingras, insisted that AMP pages would not be “automatically” ranked higher in Google’s search results. Gingras hedged that statement during the announcement, saying, “There are many signals we use in generating results. One signal we use is indeed performance. What approach the publisher takes to achieve performance is up to them.”
On 24 February 2016, Google began including AMP results in its mobile search results, claiming that “webpages built with AMP load an average of four times faster and use 10 times less data than equivalent non-AMP pages.” Google will also optionally cache AMP pages on its content delivery network (CDN) at no cost to publishers.
The promise of AMP is performance with little work (on WordPress, for example, an official plugin automatically provides AMP pages); that’s the incentive — the carrot. But Google’s coercion — and its leading elbows — comes behind the encouragement of using its specific tool to build a specific version of a web page for a specific purpose. Google hand-waves lots about AMP supporting the open web, but something about this vaguely feels an awful lot like a walled garden. Google seems to be building an alternative mobile web abutting the open web. It’s another instance of Google trying to force the web to behave the way it wants.
In an excellent analysis, Dan Gillmor appropriately lays blame for the need of AMP at the feet of media companies:
“Looking for money in a business that grows more financially troubled by the month, media companies have infested articles with garbage code, much of it on behalf of advertising/surveillance companies, to the extent that readers have quite reasonably rebelled. We don’t like slow-responding sites, period. On our mobile devices, which are taking over as the way we ‘consume’ information, we despise having to download megabytes of crapware just to read something, because the carriers charge us for the privilege. That’s one reason why we use ad blockers. (The other, at least for me, is that we despise being spied on so relentlessly.) The news business could have solved this problem without racing into the arms of giant, centralized tech companies. But it didn’t, and here we are.
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“Google’s surveillance-dependent business model should give us all pause, but it does have a stake in maintaining an open web, or at least a web open enough for its own, search-advertising business to continue to thrive. To the extent that the competition can capture the advertising that flows into its version of the internet, the demise of an open web is a clear and present danger to Google.”
Google, the feudal computing lord
As the distributed denial of service (DDoS)/botnet/malware/ransomware phenomenon continues to grow at an alarming rate, here comes Google to the rescue — elbows out and leading, of course — with its Project Shield initiative.
Independent news websites can pre-register with the Google service to reverse proxy their web traffic through Google’s cloud with a simple domain name service (DNS) change. The upside is that the service is available at no charge to the publisher. The downside of using Google’s Project Shield is that your website will be unreachable in countries that block Google’s IP address blocks.
Security expert Bruce Schneier calls approaches like Google’s Project Shield “feudal computing” whereby serf publishers pledge fealty to a powerful lord in exchange for protection.
Disclosure: I’m experimenting with AMP on ARTS & FARCES internet using PageFrog’s plugin for WordPress (which prompts for installation of Automattic’s AMP plugin which is required). Please note that this is an experiment and may cease to function at any time without notice. My initial reaction is more or less indifferent. Some of the PageFrog settings don’t work (most notably adding a logo and enabling Google Analytics), and I could never get it to render pages properly. The Automattic AMP plugin, on the other hand, renders reasonably well but requires putzing with CSS for proper typography and color scheme. ARTS & FARCES internet is already responsive and loads reasonably quickly on mobile devices.