Twitter launches encrypted DMs behind a paywall
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
In a new support document, Twitter has detailed what you can expect from the first version of the platform’s encrypted direct messages. Perhaps most notably, to be able to send and receive encrypted messages, you’ll have to pay Twitter for the ability to do so. Platforms like WhatsApp, Messenger, Signal, and iMessage already offer encrypted messaging for free, so having to pay for the feature on Twitter might be a hard pill to swallow.
According to the document, encrypted DMs are only available if you are a verified user (somebody who pays for Twitter Blue), a verified organization (an organization that pays $1,000 per month), or an affiliate of a verified organization (which costs $50 per month per person). Both the sender and recipient must be on the latest version of the Twitter app (on mobile and web). And an encrypted DM recipient must follow the sender, have sent a message to the sender in the past, or accept a DM request from the sender at some point.
If you are a person who can send encrypted messages to somebody who can receive them, you’ll see a lock toggle while you’re drafting a message. In an encrypted conversation, you’ll also see a small lock icon next to the avatar of the person you’re chatting with. Encrypted DMs will be separate from unencrypted ones.
Encrypted DMs currently have a few limitations and a very big flaw. You can only send them in one-on-one conversations; Twitter says it will “soon” bring the feature to groups. You can only send text and links. And Twitter warns that it doesn’t have protections against man-in-the-middle attacks. “As a result, if someone — for example, a malicious insider, or Twitter itself as a result of a compulsory legal process — were to compromise an encrypted conversation, neither the sender or receiver would know,” Twitter says.
The company is planning mechanisms to make man-in-the-middle attacks more difficult and alert users if one happens. “As Elon Musk said, when it comes to Direct Messages, the standard should be, if someone puts a gun to our heads, we still can’t access your messages,” the company wrote. “We’re not quite there yet, but we’re working on it.”
Twitter also notes that while messages and reactions to encrypted DMs are encrypted, “metadata (recipient, creation time, etc.) are not, and neither is any linked content (only links themselves, not any content they refer to, is encrypted).”
Encrypted DMs seem to be a priority for Musk; it’s a feature he spelled out as part of “Twitter 2.0” for employees in November. But blue checkmarks are already unpopular enough, and I doubt that forcing you to pay for an important feature you can easily get for free elsewhere is going to improve their reputation.
Google and Taito are teaming up on an AR Space Invaders game
Image: Google
Google and Taito are partnering on a new augmented reality version of the arcade classic Space Invaders. The new game, Space Invaders: World Defense, will use Google tools like ARCore and newly-announced Geospatial Creator to let AR Space Invaders aliens fly around real-world locations.
Based on a GIF in a Google tweet, it appears you’ll play the game kind of like a shooting gallery. In the GIF, a handful of aliens appear near and around a static city image, and a reticle appears so that the player can blast the aliens out of the sky. I get the sense this footage might not be fully representative of the final game, though — it kind of looks like the aliens have just been animated over a stock photo.
Google and Taito also released a promotional video that we’ve included at the top of this post, but it doesn’t appear to show anyone actually fending off aliens in World Defense. The game’s website is frustratingly bare, only including the promo video and this description of what you can expect:
For the last 45 years, SPACE INVADERS have tried to conquer the world. They are back and this time coming from another dimension. As one of Earth’s top pilots, you must use your spaceship’s advanced technology and your expert skills to travel between dimensions and defend the planet. The future of the Earth is in your hands! This unique, immersive game is powered by ARCore and Google’s Geospatial Creator to create a real-world playground in AR and 3D. Enjoy the classic gameplay in a whole new dimension: explore, find, and defeat SPACE INVADERS in your neighborhood!
And confusingly, the World Defense website shows a screenshot of a ship taking on aliens in a wireframe trench, so maybe that will be an element of the game, too.
Image: Taito
According to the promo video’s description, the game is set to release later this summer. Hopefully it fares better than some other AR games.
Twitter admits to ‘security incident’ involving Circles tweets
Feature allows users to set a list of friends and post tweets that only they are supposed to be able to read
A privacy breach at Twitter published tweets that were never supposed to be seen by anyone but the poster’s closest friends to the site at large, the company has admitted after weeks of stonewalling reports.
The site’s Circles feature allows users to set an exclusive list of friends and post tweets that only they can read. Similar to Instagram’s Close Friends setting, it allows users to share private thoughts, explicit images or unprofessional statements without risking sharing them with their wider network.
What if AI doesn’t fundamentally reshape civilisation?
This week, I spoke to Geoffrey Hinton, the English psychologist-turned-computer scientist whose work on neural networks in the 1980s set the stage for the explosion in AI capabilities over the last decade. Hinton wanted to speak to deliver a message to the world: he is afraid of the technology he helped create.
You need to imagine something more intelligent than us by the same difference that we’re more intelligent than a frog. And it’s going to learn from the web, it’s going to have read every single book that’s ever been written on how to manipulate people, and also seen it in practice.”
He now thinks the crunch time will come in the next five to 20 years, he says. “But I wouldn’t rule out a year or two. And I still wouldn’t rule out 100 years – it’s just that my confidence that this wasn’t coming for quite a while has been shaken by the realisation that biological intelligence and digital intelligence are very different, and digital intelligence is probably much better.”
A document from a Google engineer leaked online said the company had done “a lot of looking over our shoulders at OpenAI”, referring to the developer of the ChatGPT chatbot.
“The uncomfortable truth is, we aren’t positioned to win this arms race and neither is OpenAI. While we’ve been squabbling, a third faction has been quietly eating our lunch,” the engineer wrote.
Giant models are slowing us down. In the long run, the best models are the ones which can be iterated upon quickly. We should make small variants more than an afterthought, now that we know what is possible in the <20B parameter regime.
For more on Hinton, I spoke on the Today in Focus podcast about why he thinks humanity is at a crossroads.
Meanwhile, AI is quietly authoring more and more of the internet. When I turn my attention away from Hinton’s nightmares, this is the type of transformation that concerns me most.
Google tried to fix the web – by taking it over. When the company’s AMP product launched, it was the good cop to Facebook’s Instant Articles bad cop. But now it doesn’t look so shiny.
Ministers have been warned that WhatsApp isn’t bluffing when it says it wouldn’t be able to operate in the UK if the “intentional ambiguity” of the online safety bill isn’t solved.
More simple, more accessible, more reliable, less money.
Well, this is a surprise. Despite saying they’d be skipping straight from the 3-series to the 5-series of electric bikes, VanMoof just announced two new e-bikes — the full-size S4 and smaller X4 — days after its $4,000 S5 and A5 e-bikes started shipping. At $2,498 / £2,198 / €2,198 the S4 and X4 models are not only priced to compete, they should also require fewer support calls since there’s a lot less that can go wrong.
The S5 and A5’s fancy Halo Ring displays are gone, as are the integrated Apple Find My tracking, complicated three-speed automatic e-shifter, and superfluous multifunction buttons that most regular commuters don’t need.
According to VanMoof’s co-founders (and brothers) Taco and Ties Carlier, the S4 and X4 are meant to address concerns that VanMoof’s e-bikes have become too complicated for their own good.
“We spend a lot of time listening to our prospective rider. And what we heard clearly,” says Ties Carlier, “was the desire for our key features and iconic VanMoof design — in an e-bike that was even more simple, more accessible, and more reliable. We designed the S4 & X4 with iconic VanMoof tech and design but a massively simplified user experience specifically to meet their needs.”
We’ll see about the reliability claim. But what I can say already after riding an “evergreen” colored S4 for the last five days is this: If you’re in the market for a VanMoof, then the S4 and X4 are the e-bikes most people should buy — not the more expensive S5 or A5.
The S4 and X4 are essentially the same bike with different frame types and wheel sizes. Referred to collectively as SX4, they’re assembled from a mix of tech inherited from VanMoof’s older e-bikes and new flagship SA5 models. Notably, the SX4 have the better kick lock from the SA5 and use an improved two-speed internal gear hub like you’d find on the company’s e-bikes from before 2020’s SX3 series. The S4 is based on the taller S3 frame so choose the X4 model if you’re not at least 170cm (5 feet 7 inches).
Here’s a full breakdown that compares the SX4 with the discontinued SX3 and new SA5 models:
Source: VanMoof
VanMoof S4 and X4 compared to the previous generation S3 and X3 and new S5 and A5.
There’s no display of any kind on the SX4 models which is fine by me. But the SX4 ship with an SP Connect phone mount (you provide the case) that lets you fire up the very good VanMoof app to use as a dashboard if you want. Unfortunately, the SX4 models lack the SA5’s USB-C charging port, but you do get hydraulic disc brakes which is the norm for VanMoof.
Improved two-speed internal gear hub has its legacy in VanMoof’s pre-S3 e-bikes.
Riding the S4 is a treat. I’m six feet tall (183cm) and prefer the S4 which stands a few inches taller than the S5. And since I live in a city that doesn’t require a car, I appreciate the new 27.5-inch wheels with wide 2.25-inch puncture resistant tires as someone who, for twenty years, has bicycled daily in all kinds of weather. I need a strong base to carry the kids to school, commute to an office, and then return home with groceries, small appliances, or the occasional Christmas tree. The wider tire width does, however, present a challenge in some bicycle racks designed for standard tires.
And despite lacking a torque sensor found in the SA5, the S4’s 250W front-hub motor tied to the automatic (mechanical) two-speed shifter and RPM sensor still offered a rather intuitive pedal-assisted ride, especially when supplementing things with the occasional press of the boost button. The ride could be improved, however.
The pedals can be slippery when it’s wet outside, and sometimes the S4’s pedal-assisted power can be supplied for a split second too long after pedaling stops. And often after coasting at medium-to-high speeds, stepping on the pedals will cause them to spin freely for up to a full revolution before reengaging with the chain drive. You’ll know the feeling if you ever rode a VanMoof S2 or X2.
Still, I’ll echo what I said in the VanMoof S5 review, I wish VanMoof offered a single-speed belt-drive option paired with that boost button. That would be magical and further reduce the chances of things going wrong.
I don’t have enough data for a range test, yet — I’ll update this review with real-world numbers as soon as I have them. VanMoof says that the SX4 should get the same 60km (37 miles) range as the SX3 and SA5 in max power mode and my testing on both of those e-bikes was between 47km / 29.2 miles (S3) and 48.6km / 30.2 miles (S5). I’d expect the same from the S4 and its 478WH battery, maybe more since it’s not affected by the idle battery drain issue I discovered on the S5. Notably, the SX4’s batteries charge from 0 to 100 percent in 4 hours and 30 minutes with the included charger — two hours faster than the flagship SA5 series.
The SX4 models — like all VanMoofs — don’t have user removable batteries which is a problem for anyone faced with hoisting the 21.6kg (47.6 pounds) e-bike up stairs. VanMoof does offer a $348 / €348 378Wh PowerBank range extender option for the S4 that can be charged inside.
The S4 at home in Amsterdam.
The S4 is defined by what it is not. At $2,498 it’s not expensive for a premium e-bike in 2023, a price that undercuts the Cowboy 4 series by $1,000. The S4 also isn’t overloaded with features most daily commuters don’t need and that could create service headaches down the road.
One thing the SX4 models do add is color. You can choose a deep green like my review bike, a purple pastel, yellow, and a don’t call it white “foam green.” Colors that should help brighten up the most dour city streets.
Image: VanMoof (edited by The Verge)
The VanMoof X4 showing all four color options for it and the S4.
The S4 I’ve been testing is an excellent e-bike — one of the best, and superior to the VanMoof S5 in terms of value for money. Whether the S4 and X4 continue to be great e-bikes after months of wear and tear is anyone’s guess.
I asked VanMoof to respond to owner concerns about reliability and support. Here’s the statement I received from CEO and co-founder Taco Carlier:
Improving service is our priority. Higher reliability sits at the core of the S4 and X4 design and development process with tackling the top 6 challenges of the S3 and X3 and incorporating learnings from the SA5. Our Service network strategy has expanded towards more focus on bike servicing to get closer to our riders, offer more options and more capacity. More news here will follow in the next few weeks.
Yes, I’m also curious to hear what’s coming.
VanMoof currently offers one of the most extensive networks of service hubs available in cities around Europe, Japan, and the US. That’s important because most VanMoof e-bike parts are custom made and only available from VanMoof — so make sure you have a service center nearby if you’re interested in buying. You’re also covered by a two-year warranty in Europe, one in the US, and free 14-day returns.
Sales begin now on a staggered basis before they’re scheduled to ship in August. You can preorder the S4 and X4 in the same “evergreen” color I reviewed starting today, purple in late May, yellow in late June, and “foam green” in late July.
I’d suggesting waiting a tick if you’re tempted to buy. Let the early adopters test VanMoof’s claims of improved reliability and service — you’ve got better things to do with your time.
The Discreet Thrill of Lurking Online There’s a world of wholesome drama out there in strangers’ social media content, if you know where to look. You don’t even need to post yourself.
Volvo’s next electric vehicle is a small SUV called the EX30
Image: Volvo
Volvo’s new, next-generation electric vehicle, the luxuriously appointed, three-row EX90 SUV, isn’t even out yet, but the Swedish company is already talking about the follow-up. The Volvo EX30 will be a small SUV that will have its global debut on June 7th. US reservations will also open up on that date.
The EX30 name had been floating around for a few weeks now, but knowing that the EV will be getting a proper debut relatively soon is sure to excite fans of Swedish design and the company’s commitment to leveraging technology to enhance the vehicle’s safety.
Interestingly, Volvo is going all in on the size of the vehicle. “Thinking small is one of our biggest ideas,” the company says in its press release. And indeed, the vehicle is likely to slot in underneath Volvo’s 40 series of EVs, including the C40 Recharge and XC40 Recharge.
But it will still retain its SUV shape, which means it will probably ride higher than the C40 Recharge. Volvo is going after younger car buyers with this EV, the types of customers who have yet to move out to the suburbs to start a family. Expect something sporty, with an emphasis on adventure seeking, but compact enough to parallel park on a city street.
Volvo’s CEO said as much last year when the company first teased its upcoming slate of EVs. “Take a smaller SUV, which is more for city driving, maybe for first-time buyers,” Jim Rowan explained, according to Top Gear. “Gen Z — 18-, 19-year-olds — is our next market. We don’t talk to Gen Z right now, the brand has never really spoken to that younger demographic. We are absolutely heading in that direction.”
Still, the EX30 is likely to have a lot of competition when it comes out. In addition to the compact, two-row electric SUVs currently dominating the market — Tesla Model Y, Ford Mustang Mach-E, Hyundai Ioniq 5, and Kia EV6 — there is also a slew of new models coming out that Volvo will need to contend with, including the Chevy Equinox and Blazer EVs, Polestar 3, and Honda Prologue.
Apple co-founder warns AI could make it harder to spot scams
Steve Wozniak says content created with artificial intelligence should be labelled and calls for regulation
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has warned that artificial intelligence could be used by “bad actors” and make it harder to spot scams and misinformation.
Wozniak, who was one of Apple’s co-founders with the late Steve Jobs and invented the company’s first computer, said AI content should be clearly labelled, and called for regulation for the sector.
With above-inflation increases, tips and tricks to find the right plan are even more important
There’s a dizzying array of mobile phone tariffs, and with many providers recently imposing above-inflation increases, it is even more important to choose the right deal. So how can you navigate the networks to get a plan that is right for you? What are the top tips for saving money?
On the trail of the Dark Avenger: the most dangerous virus writer in the world
Bulgaria in the 1980s became known as the ‘virus factory’, where hundreds of malicious computer programs were unleashed to wreak havoc. But who was writing them, and why?
In the 1980s, there was no better place than Bulgaria for virus lovers. The socialist country – plagued by hyperinflation, crumbling infrastructure, food and petrol rationing, daily blackouts and packs of wild dogs in its streets – had become one of the hottest hi-tech zones on the planet. Legions of young Bulgarian programmers were tinkering on their pirated IBM PC clones, pumping out computer viruses that managed to travel to the gleaming and prosperous west.
In 1989, an article appeared in Bulgaria’s leading computer magazine saying the media’s treatment of computer viruses was sensationalist and inaccurate. The article, in the January issue of Bulgaria’s Computer for You magazine, titled The Truth About Computer Viruses, was written by Vesselin Bontchev, a 29-year-old researcher at the Institute of Industrial Cybernetics and Robotics at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in Sofia. Fear of computer viruses, Bontchev wrote, was turning into “mass psychosis”.
Google I/O 2023: how to watch and what to expect
Illustration: The Verge
Google I/O is almost here, and that means the launch of the highly anticipated Pixel Fold and Pixel Tablet is right around the corner. While the annual conference is largely geared toward developers, the company always holds a keynote revealing the latest and greatest things that’ll wind up in consumers’ hands.
If you want to watch the keynote live but aren’t attending the event, here’s all the information about when and where you can stream it, as well as what you can expect.
When is the main Google I/O 2023 keynote?
The main Google I/O 2023 keynote kicks off on May 10th, 2023, at 1PM ET / 10AM PT and will feature remarks from Google CEO Sundar Pichai. This year, the event will take place in person with a limited live audience at the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, California.
Where can I watch the Google I/O keynote?
There are several places where you can watch the keynote online, including from Google’s website, Google’s YouTube channel, and through the video embedded at the very top of this post. If you aren’t around to watch the stream live, you can always watch a recorded version of the event on YouTube after the fact.
With all that out of the way, here are some of the things we expect Google to announce during the event.
While Google didn’t reveal any details about its specifications, a previous report from CNBC suggests that the device could feature a 5.8-inch display when closed shut and a 7.6-inch screen when unfolded, the same size as Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 4.
Under the hood, the Pixel Fold is expected to use Google’s Tensor G2, the system on a chip used by Pixel 7-series devices. Like the other foldables on the market, the Pixel Fold probably won’t come cheap. According to CNBC, it could cost upwards of $1,700.
Google previously said that the tablet will come with an included charging dock and speaker that lets you use the device like a smart display, such as the Amazon Echo Show. The latest rumors from 9to5Google also indicate that it could come with Google’s Tensor G2 chip, Android 13, 8GB of RAM, a nanoceramic finish, and feature an 11-inch display.
An early Pixel Tablet listing on Amazon (which has since been removed) corroborates these rumors, but it also indicates that the device could come with two 8-megapixel cameras on its front and back, three microphones, up to 256GB of storage, and USI 2.0 stylus support. We still don’t know how much the Pixel Tablet will cost, though. Rumors point to between €600 to €650 in Europe, but Google’s European prices are sometimes higher than those in the US.
A look at the heavily leaked midrange Google Pixel 7A
Some of the device’s rumored specs include a Tensor G2 chip, an upgraded 64MP main camera, and a 13MP ultrawide camera. It could also launch with two features never before seen with Google’s budget-friendly A-series devices: a 90Hz refresh rate and support for wireless charging. These upgrades come with a bit of a tradeoff, though, as rumors suggest it could cost $50 more than the Pixel 6A at $499.
Since then, Google has been gradually adding new features to Android 14, like a new back arrow that blends with your background, passkey support, improved battery life, and more control over your privacy in your device’s media library. Android 14 is also expected to add improved font scaling ahead of its public rollout later this year.
A preview of the Google Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro
Image: OnLeaks and Smartprix
In addition to the potential launch of the Pixel 7A, Google might also give us a glimpse at the upcoming Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro, just like it did with the Pixel 7 during last year’s I/O. Google isn’t expected to officially launch the device until the fall, so it’s entirely possible the company will skip an early preview and instead keep the focus on new devices like the Fold. But if Google does show something, we already know a little bit about what to expect.
Leaked renders from Smartprix and OnLeaks reveal a redesigned camera bar on the Pixel 8 Pro that includes all three cameras in a single oval cutout. There’s also a sensor located beneath the flash that Smartprix believes could be a macro or depth sensor. The renders of the standard Pixel 8, however, show a camera setup similar to the one on the Pixel 7.
The Pixel 8 Pro is expected to come with a 6.52-inch display with more rounded corners, a hole-punch selfie camera, and 12GB of RAM, while the regular Pixel 8 will feature a 6.2-inch screen with 8GB of RAM. Another finding from 9to5Google indicates that the Pixel 8 series could come with an exclusive Video Unblur tool to sharpen videos.
Expect some AI surprises
Image: Google
With the launch of Google’s ChatGPT rival Bard, Google has gone all in on AI, and it’s likely that Google will use up a chunk of its I/O keynote to make some sort of AI-related announcements.
It’s always possible that Google could reveal a wildcard product, like an update to the Pixel Watch. And a new color of the Pixel Buds A-series seems to be on the table. But with the launch of the Pixel Tablet and Pixel Fold, Google will have a pretty exciting event as it is.
The company is more likely to sprinkle some smaller announcements in between its hardware launches, like updates to Maps, Photos, and Google Assistant. It may even have some news to share about its smart home products as it continues to add new features to its Google Home app.
If you want to stay up to date on Google’s latest announcements, make sure to stay tuned to our Google I/O storystream.
What happens when Google Search doesn’t have the answers?
Illustration by Jason Allen Lee for The Verge
After controlling how information has been distributed for the past 25 years, Google Search faces a set of challenges that will change the company — and the internet — forever.
Google turns 25 this year. Can you imagine? It’s only 25 — yet it’s almost impossible to recall life without being able to just Google it, without immediate access to answers. Google Search is everywhere, all the time; the unspoken background of every problem, every debate, every curiosity.
Google Search is so useful and so pervasive that its overwhelming influence on our lives is also strangely invisible: Google’s grand promise was to organize the world’s information, but over the past quarter century, an enormous amount of the world’s information has been organized for Google — to rank in Google results. Almost everything you encounter on the web — every website, every article, every infobox — has been designed in ways that makes them easy for Google to understand. In many cases, the internet has become more parseable by search engines than it is by humans.
We live in an information ecosystem whose design is dominated by the needs of the Google Search machine — a robot whose beneficent gaze can create entire industries just as easily as its cool indifference can destroy them.
This robot has a priesthood and a culture all to itself: an ecosystem of search-engine-optimization experts who await every new proclamation from Google with bated breath and scurry about interpreting those proclamations into rituals and practices as liturgical as any religion. You know why the recipe blogs all have 2,000 words of copy before the actual recipe? The Google robot wants it that way. You know why every publisher is putting bios next to author bylines on article pages? The robot wants it that way. All those bold subheadings in the middle of articles asking random questions? That’s how Google answers those questions on the search results page. Google is the most meaningful source of traffic on the web, and so now the web looks more like a structured database for search instead of anything made for actual people.
And yet, it keeps working. Google is so dominant that the European Union has spent a decade launching aggressive interventions into the user experience of computers to create competition in search and effectively failed… because our instinct is to always just Google it. People love asking Google questions, and Google loves making money by answering them.
And yet, 25 years on, Google Search faces a series of interlocking AI-related challenges that together represent an existential threat to Google itself.
The first is a problem of Google’s own making: the SEO monster has eaten the user experience of search from the inside out. Searching the web for information is an increasingly user-hostile experience, an arbitrage racket run by search-optimized content sharks running an ever-changing series of monetization hustles with no regard for anything but collecting the most pennies at the biggest scale. AI-powered content farms focused on high-value search terms like heat-seeking missiles are already here; Google is only now catching up, and its response to them will change how it sends traffic around the web in momentous ways.
That leads to the second problem, which is that chat-based search tools like Microsoft’s Bing and Google’s own Bard represent something that feels like the future of search, without any of the corresponding business models or revenue that Google has built up over the past 25 years. If Google Search continues to degrade in quality, people will switch to better options — a switch that venture-backed startups and well-funded competitors like Microsoft are more than happy to subsidize in search of growth, but which directly impacts Google’s bottom line. At the same time, Google’s paying tens of billions annually to device makers like Apple and Samsung to be the default search engine on phones. Those deals are up for renewal, and there will be no pity for Google’s margins in these negotiations.
On top of that, the generative AI boom is built on an expansive interpretation of copyright law, as all of these companies hoover up data from the open web in order to train their models. Google was an original innovator here: as a startup, the company aggressively pushed the boundaries of intellectual property law and told itself and investors that the inevitable legal fees and fines were simply the cost of building Search and YouTube into monopolies. The resulting case law and settlement deals created the legal architecture of the web as we know it — an information ecosystem that allows for things like indexing and the use of image thumbnails without payment.
But the coming wave of AI lawsuits and regulations will be very different. Google won’t be the scrappy upstart pitching an obviously world-altering utility to judges and regulators who’ve never used the internet. It is now one of the richest and most influential corporations in the world, a fat target for creatives, politicians, and cynical rent-seekers alike. It will face a fractured legal landscape, both around the world and increasingly in our own country. All of that early Google-driven internet precedent is up for grabs — and if things go even slightly differently this time around, the web will look very different than it does today.
Oh, and then there’s the hardest challenge of all: Google, famously scattershot in its product launches and quick to abandon things, has to stay focused on a new product and actually develop a meaningful replacement to search without killing it in a year and starting over.
This is not a prediction of imminent doom, or any particular doom at all: Google is a well-run company full of very smart people, and Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai is as thoughtful and sharp as any leader in tech. But it is a dead-certain prediction of change — these are the first serious challenges to search in two decades, and the challenges are real. The extent to which Google Search might change as the company reacts to those challenges is enormous, and any change to Google Search will alter our relationship to the internet in momentous ways. And yet, the cultural influence of Google Search is invisible to most people, even as Search arrives at the precipice.
It’s easy to see the effect some tech products have had on our lives — it’s easy to talk about smartphones and streaming services and dating apps. But Google Search is a black hole: one of the most lucrative businesses in world history, but somehow impossible to see clearly. As Google faces its obstacles head-on, the seams holding the invisible architecture of the web together are starting to show. It’s time to talk about what 25 years of Google Search has done to our culture and talk about what might happen next. It’s time to look right at it and say it’s there.
We’re going to be doing that for the rest of the year in a series of stories that starts today with a look at Google’s influence over the media business — influence that led to something called AMP. We’ll also be looking at the world of SEO hustlers as the party comes to a close and take a look at the ecosystem of small businesses content-farming to stay afloat. We’ll show you how Google’s influence shapes the design of almost all the web pages you see, and investigate why it’s so hard to build a competing search engine.
For 25 years, Google Search has held the web together. Let’s make sure we understand what that meant before it all falls apart.
How Google tried to fix the web — by taking it over
Google promised to create a better, faster web for media companies with a new standard called AMP. In the end, it ruined the trust publishers had in the internet giant.
In 2015, Google hatched a plan to save the mobile web by effectively taking it over. And for a while, the media industry had practically no choice but to play along.
It began on a cheery October morning in New York City; the company had gathered the press together at a buzzy breakfast spot named Sadelle’s in SoHo. As the assembled reporters ate their bagels and lox, Google’s vice president of news, Richard Gingras, explained that the open web was in crisis. Sites were too slow, too hard to use, too filled with ads. As a result, he warned, people were flocking to the better experiences offered by social platforms and app stores. If this trend continued, it would be the end of the web as we know it.
But Google had a plan to fight back: Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP, a new format for designing mobile-first webpages. AMP would ensure that the mobile web could be as fast, as usable, instantly loading, and every bit as popular as mobile apps. “We are here to make sure that the web evolves, and our entire focus is on that effort,” Gingras said. “We are here to make the web great again.”
“Make the web great again” was a popular phrase across Google at the time, echoing the burgeoning presidential campaign of an upstart Republican named Donald Trump. There was a lot of technical work behind the slogan: Google was building its own Chrome browser into a viable web-first operating system for laptops; trying to replace native apps with Progressive Web Apps; pushing to make the more secure HTTPS standard across the web; and promoting new top-level domains that would aim to make .blog and .pizza as important as .com. Much of this was boring or went over the heads of media execs. The point was that Google was promising to wrest distribution power away from Apple and Facebook and back into the hands of publishers.
After a decade of newspapers disappearing, magazine circulations shrinking, and websites’ business dwindling, the media industry had become resigned to its own powerlessness. Even the most cynical publishers had grown used to playing whatever games platforms like Google and Facebook demanded in a quest for traffic. And as Facebook chaotically pivoted to video, that left Google as the overwhelming driver of traffic to websites all over the web. What choice did anyone have?
“If Google said, ‘you must have your homepage colored bright pink on Tuesdays to be the result in Google,’ everybody would do it, because that’s what they need to do to survive,” says Terence Eden, a web standards expert and a former member of the Google AMP Advisory Committee. One media executive who worked on AMP projects but who, like other sources in this story, requested anonymity to speak about Google, framed the tradeoff even more simply: “you want access to this audience, you need to play by these rules.”
Adopting Google’s strange new version of the web resulted in an irresistible flood of traffic for publishers at first: using AMP increased search traffic to one major national magazine’s site by 20 percent, according to the executive who oversaw the implementation.
But AMP came with huge tradeoffs, most notably around how all those webpages were monetized. AMP made it harder to use ad tech that didn’t come from Google, fraying the relationship between Google and the media so badly that AMP became a key component in an antitrust lawsuit filed just five years after its launch in 2020 by 17 state attorneys general, accusing Google of maintaining an illegal monopoly on the advertising industry. The states argue that Google designed AMP in part to thwart publishers from using alternative ad tools — tools that would have generated more money for publishers and less for Google. Another lawsuit, filed in January 2023 by the US Justice Department, went even further, alleging that Google envisioned AMP as “an effort to push parts of the open web into a Google-controlled walled garden, one where Google could dictate more directly how digital advertising space could be sold.”
Here in 2023, AMP seems to have faded away. Most publishers have started dropping support, and even Google doesn’t seem to care much anymore. The rise of ChatGPT and other AI services pose a much more direct threat to its search business than Facebook Instant Articles and Apple News ever did. But the media industry is still dependent on Google’s fire hose of traffic, and as the company searches for its next move, the story of how it ruthlessly used AMP in an attempt to control the very structure and business of the web makes clear exactly how far it will go to preserve its business — and how powerless the web may be to stop it.
AMP succeeded spectacularly. Then it failed. And to anyone looking for a reason not to trust the biggest company on the internet, AMP’s story contains all the evidence you’ll ever need.
The small-screen shake-up
Earlier in 2015, months before AMP launched, one of Google’s key metrics was on the verge of a dramatic flip: the volume of searches coming from mobile phones was just about to outnumber the ones coming from desktop and laptop computers. This shift had been a long time coming, and Google saw it as an existential threat. The company had become a nearly $75 billion annual business almost entirely on ads — which made up about 90 percent of its revenue — and the most important ones by far were the ones atop search results in desktop browsers. By some internal measures, a typical mobile search at the time brought in about one-sixth as much ad revenue as on desktop. The increasingly mobile-focused future could mean a disastrous revenue drop for Google.
In public, Google framed AMP as something like a civic mission, an attempt to keep the web open and accessible to everyone instead of moving to closed gardens like Facebook Instant Articles or Apple News, which offered superior mobile reading experiences. “To some degree, on mobile, [the web] has not fully satisfied users’ expectations,” Gingras said at the launch event. “We are hoping to change that.”
But the fight to fix the mobile web wasn’t just an altruistic move in the name of teamwork and openness and kumbaya. Internally, some viewed it as a battle for Google’s own survival. As smartphones became the default browsing experience for billions of users around the world, the mobile web was becoming the only web that really mattered. Google’s competitors were exerting far more control over how users lived their lives on their phones: readers were getting their news from native apps and from proprietary formats created by Facebook and Apple. Google worried that if enough users switched to these faster, simpler, more controlled experiences, it risked being left out altogether.
As Big Tech companies took over the ad industry, it did so largely at the expense of publishers. Newspapers used to be the way to advertise your new hair salon, or you might buy local TV ads to hawk the latest appliances for sale in your store. By 2015, most advertisers just went through Facebook and Google, which offered a more targeted and more efficient way to reach buyers.
Google, obviously aware that it was taking revenue from publishers, occasionally tried to make nice. Sometimes that meant creating new products, like the awkwardly named Google Play Newsstand, to give media companies another place to distribute and sell content. Sometimes — often, actually — it meant just giving publishers a bunch of money whenever a government would get mad, like the €60 million “Digital Publishing Innovation Fund” Google set up in France after a group of European publishers sued and settled with the search giant.
This “we care about publishers!” dance is a staple of Silicon Valley. Apple briefly promised to save the news business with the iPad, convincing publishers around the world to build bespoke tablet magazines before mostly abandoning that project. Facebook remains in a perpetually whipsawing relationship with the media, too: it will promote stories in the News Feed only to later demote them in favor of “Meaningful Social Interactions,” then promise publishers endless video eyeballs before mostly giving up on Facebook Watch.
The platforms need content to keep users entertained and engaged; publishers need distribution for their content to be seen. At best, it’s a perfectly symbiotic relationship. At worst, and all too often, the platforms simply cajole publishers into doing whatever the platforms need to increase engagement that quarter.
For publishers over the last decade, chasing platform policies and supporting new products has become the only means of survival. “That’s the sort of tradeoff publishers are used to,” says one media executive who was involved with AMP in its early days. “Do it this way and you’ll get an audience.” But while publishers had long been wary of the tendency of Big Tech companies to suck up ad dollars and user data, they had seen Google as something closer to a partner. “You meet with a Facebook person and you see in their eyes they’re psychotic,” says one media executive who’s dealt with all the major platforms. “The Apple person kind of listens but then does what it wants to do. The Google person honestly thinks what they’re doing is the best thing.”
Phones potentially made all of this harder. For Google, search was harder to monetize on smaller screens with correspondingly fewer ad slots, and it was also, in some ways, an inferior product. That was largely for reasons out of Google’s control: many of the mobile websites Google sent users to were slow, covered in autoplaying video and unclosable ads, and generally considered a worse experience than the apps that publishers and media organizations had been focused on for the last several years. Google executives talked often internally about being ashamed of sending people to some websites.
But the big reason for consternation within Google was a company just a few miles down the road. If mobile was going to win, then so was Facebook. This was pre-metaverse Facebook, of course, when the company was a booming social networking giant, a thriving ad business, and a mobile success story: Facebook reported in April 2015 that it had 1.25 billion mobile active users on its products every month and that nearly three-quarters of its advertising revenue was coming from mobile.
Facebook was, to most users, a mobile app, not a website. Google can’t crawl a mobile app. And it got worse: most content on Facebook was shared among friends and followers and, as such, was completely opaque to Google, even on the web. For most of its existence, Google could take for granted that the vast majority of the internet’s content would be open and searchable. As Facebook grew, and social media in general began to replace blogs and forums, it felt like Google’s view of the internet was shrinking.
Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg made no secret of Facebook’s ambitions to take on Google, to take on everybody, really: the CEO’s aim was to turn Facebook into a platform the size of the internet. But he wanted to win at search, too, first by better indexing Facebook content and then by ultimately doing the same to the web. “There’s a lot of public content that’s out there that any web search engine can go index and provide,” he told investors in the spring of 2015.
The simplest thing to do would be to beat Facebook at its own game. But Google had already tried that — a few times. Seeing the rise of social networking, and the threat that friend-sourced content posed to Google’s search-based business model, the company poured resources into the Google Plus social network. But it never caught on and, by 2015, was effectively on its last legs. There was simply no way to out-Facebook Facebook.
Around the same time, Facebook also launched Instant Articles, a Facebook-specific tool that turned web articles into native posts on the platform. The pitch for Instant Articles was simple: they would speed up the News Feed, making it quicker to read stories so users didn’t have to suffer through the mobile web’s interminable load times and hideous pages. Instant Articles made some publishers nervous since it effectively loaded their content directly onto Facebook’s platform and gave the company complete control over their audiences. Some opted out entirely. But many others saw too big a potential audience to ignore and developed tools to syndicate their stories as Instant Articles.
A few months later, Apple launched Apple News, its own proprietary article format and app for displaying publisher content. At its own developer conference that spring, Apple’s then-VP of product management, Susan Prescott, made a case that sounded eerily like Facebook’s. “The articles can come from anywhere,” she said, “but the best ones are built in our new Apple News format.” Software chief Craig Federighi followed up with a backhanded swipe at Google News and Facebook. “Unlike just about any other news aggregation service we’re aware of on the planet, News is designed from the ground up with your privacy in mind.”
The media industry, collectively, bought the hype around what came to be known as “distributed publishing.” “Is the media becoming a wire service?” asked Ezra Klein at Vox in a piece that kicked off a million AMP and Instant Articles projects. “My guess is that within three years, it will be normal for news organizations of even modest scale to be publishing to some combination of their own websites, a separate mobile app, Facebook Instant Articles, Apple News, Snapchat, RSS, Facebook Video, Twitter Video, YouTube, Flipboard, and at least one or two major players yet to be named,” he wrote. “The biggest publishers will be publishing to all of these simultaneously.”
To some at Google, all of this looked a lot like a few proprietary platforms conspiring to kill the open web. Which might kill Google. Search — and its behemoth ad business — only worked if the web was full of open, indexable pages that its search crawlers could see and direct users to. Instant Articles and Apple News also gave those platforms control over the advertising on their pages, which threatened AdWords, another of Google’s largest revenue streams.
Over the course of 2015, as Google debated internally how best to respond, the company also hosted a clubby “unconference” called Newsgeist. Google held these periodically in partnership with the Knight Foundation as a way to work with and hear from the news industry. Jeff Jarvis, a CUNY professor and media critic, had been agitating at Newsgeist events for years for Google to build what he called “the embeddable newspaper,” a way for news articles to be displayed around the internet in much the same way a YouTube video can be embedded practically anywhere. Gingras also liked the idea; he was a big believer in what he called “portable content.”
In May 2015, at the first Newsgeist Europe in Helsinki, Finland, Instant Articles was a topic of much conversation. Jarvis, in particular, saw Instant Articles as a useful technical prototype with all the wrong attributes: it was closed off, only worked on one platform, and accrued no value back to publishers. Jarvis spent time at the conference arguing for someone — presumably Google — to build a better alternative.
Ultimately, what the company built was AMP. Done right, it could bring the same speed, simplicity, and design to the entire internet — without closing it off. To lead the effort, Google designated two people who had come from Google Plus: David Besbris, who had led the company’s wayward social networking effort, and Malte Ubl, who helped to build the social network’s technical infrastructure.
At least, that’s how Google described it publicly. According to interviews with former employees, publishing executives, and experts associated with the early days of AMP, while it was waxing poetic about the value and future of the open web, Google was privately urging publishers into handing over near-total control of how their articles worked and looked and monetized. And it was wielding the web’s most powerful real estate — the top of search results — to get its way.
“[Google] came to us and said, the internet is broken, ads aren’t loading, blah blah, blah. We want to provide a better user experience to users by coming up with this clean standard,” says one magazine product executive. “My reaction was that the main problem is ads, so why don’t you fix the ads? They said they can’t fix the ads. It’s too hard.”
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Faster, faster, faster
Before it was called AMP, Google’s nascent web standard was known as PCU — Portable Content Unit. The team of Googlers building the new format had only one goal, or at least only one that mattered: make webpages faster. There were lots of other goals, like giving publishers monetization and branding options, but all of that was secondary to load times. If the page appeared instantly after a user tapped the link in search results, AMP would feel as instant and native as an app. Nothing else mattered as much as speed.
Google had tried in the past to incentivize publishers to make their own webpages faster. Load times had long been a factor in how the search engine ranked sites on desktop, for instance, and load times were presented front and center in Google Analytics. Google even built a tool called “Instant Pages” that tried to guess which sites users would click on and pre-render those pages so they’d appear more quickly.
And yet, the mobile web still, in a word, sucked. “Publishers, frankly, then — and to a great degree still now — considered mobile web traffic to be essentially junk traffic,” says Aron Pilhofer, a longtime media executive and now a journalism professor at Temple University. Many mobile websites were completely separate entities from their desktop pages, prefaced with “mobile.” or “m.” in their URLs. Publishers compensated for small screens with more ads per page, and the whole industry was in the midst of an unfortunate obsession with autoplaying video. Phone browsers were bad; the webpages were even worse.
Google didn’t have great tools for understanding mobile pages at the time, so it couldn’t easily issue the same “we just like fast pages” edict. It could take the effort to develop those metrics and then urge publishers to update their sites to meet Google’s bar for speed, but there simply wasn’t time. Internally, Google felt it needed a solution immediately. Competition was here. AMP was a blunt object, but it was designed to get results quickly. AMP’s purpose, Google’s Gingras said at the 2015 launch event, “is about making sure the World Wide Web is not the World Wide Wait.”
AMP was, in many ways, a step backward for the web. Nieman Lab’s Joshua Benton noted at the time that Google’s sample AMP-powered webpages “look a lot like the web of, say, 2002, shrunk down to a phone screen.”
But it was fast. And to Google, that was all that mattered.
The growth hack to end all growth hacks
For AMP to work, Google knew it needed to get broad adoption. But simply asking publishers to support a new standard wouldn’t be easy. Publishers were already neglecting their mobile websites, which was the whole problem, and they weren’t likely to sign up to work on them just for Google’s benefit.
The team tried a few things to get more AMP content, like auto-converting stories from the Google Play Newsstand and elsewhere. WordPress began working on a plug-in that made creating AMP pages as easy as checking a box every time you published a post. One way some people in and outside of Google thought of AMP was similar to RSS — another syndication format, another box to click next to the one that tweets the story and posts the top image on Instagram. But Google worried that this approach would give all AMP pages a same-y, boring look and reader experience. What Google really needed was for publishers to not just support AMP but also embrace it.
The team quickly landed on a much more powerful growth hack: Google’s search results. It would be easy for Google to factor AMP into the way it ranks search results, to effectively tell publishers that AMP-powered pages would be higher on the list, and anything else would be pushed down the page. (It had previously done something similar with HTTPS, another push toward a new web standard.) Publishers, most of them existentially reliant on the fire hose of Google traffic, would have no choice but to give in and use AMP.
Such an aggressive move would be a bad look for Google, though, not to mention a potentially anti-competitive one, especially given that the company has always maintained it cares about a webpage’s “relevance” above all else. But there was a middle ground, or maybe a loophole: a relatively new product in Google search known as the Top Stories carousel, which showed a handful of horizontally scrolling news stories at the top of some search results pages. They weren’t part of the search results, the “10 blue links” Google is known for and so scrutinized over. They were something separate, so the rules could be different.
Google said from the beginning that AMP would not be a factor in regular “10 blue link” search results. (Several publishing executives say they’re still not sure if that was true: “when Google said AMP doesn’t matter, no one believes them,” one says. The company denies that it has ever been a factor in search result rankings.) But only AMP pages would be included in the carousel, with a lightning bolt in the corner to signify that tapping that card would offer the instant loading experience users were getting from Instant Articles and Apple News.
That carousel took up most of the precious space on a phone screen, which made Top Stories some of the most important real estate on the mobile web. And so, the growth hack worked. When AMP launched in early 2016, a who’s who of publishers had signed up to support the new format: The Guardian, TheWashington Post, BuzzFeed, the BBC, The New York Times, and Vox Media, The Verge’s parent company, all quickly began developing for AMP. Others would join in the months that followed.
But many of those publishers weren’t necessarily signing up because they believed in AMP’s vision or loved the tech. Far from it. Google’s relentless focus on page speed, and on shipping as quickly as possible to thwart Facebook and Apple, meant the first versions of AMP couldn’t do very much. It didn’t support comments or paywalls, and the restrictions on JavaScript meant publishers couldn’t bring in third-party analytics or advertising. Interactive elements, even simple things like tables and charts, mostly didn’t work.
AMP, it turned out, wasn’t even that fast. Multiple publishers ran internal tests and found they were able to make pages that loaded more quickly than AMP pages, so long as they were able to rein in the ad load and extra trackers. It was much harder to build slow pages on AMP — in part because AMP couldn’t do very much — but there were lots of other ways to build good pages.
And even if AMP pages did seem to load faster from search results, “it felt faster because Google cheated,” says Barry Adams, a longtime SEO consultant. When publishers built AMP-powered pages, they submitted them to Google’s AMP Validator, which made sure the page worked right — and cleared it for access to the carousel. As it was checking the code, Google would grab a copy of the entire page and store it on Google’s own servers. Then, when someone clicked on the article in search results, rather than loading the webpage itself, Google would load its stored version. Any page pre-rendered like that would load faster, AMP or otherwise.
The AMP cache made it harder for publishers to quickly update their content — and made it nearly impossible for them to understand how people were using their sites. On cached pages, even the URL began with “google.com,” rather than the publisher’s own domain. It was as if Google had subsumed the entire publishing industry inside its office park in Mountain View.
Google kept promising publishers that this restrictive, Google-controlled version of AMP was just version one, that there was much more to come. But the carousel, that all-important new space in search results, required AMP from the beginning. “The problem was that when Google launched it, they also said, ‘You have to use AMP. We built a standard, it’s shit, it’s terrible, it’s not ready, it does only like a quarter of what you need it to do, but we need you to use it anyway because otherwise we’re just not going to show your articles in mobile search results anymore,’” Adams says. “And that is what ruffled everybody’s feathers.”
“The audience people hated it because it was against audience strategy,” says one former media executive who worked with AMP. “The data people hated it because it was against advertising and privacy strategy. The engineers hated it because it’s a horrendous format to work with… The analysts hated it because we got really bad behavioral data out of it. Everyone’s like, ‘Okay, so there’s no upside to this — apart from the traffic.’”
On top of that, the traffic was worth less because it had fewer and more limited ads. “Every publisher experienced this — the AMP audience is less valuable. It’s millions of pennies and not having any dollars,” one executive says. “An AMP article earned 60 percent of what a [standard] article earned… It’s low enough to be noticeable. You were just playing the game of ‘if I didn’t have all this traffic, would I make more money?’”
“Google did not have an answer for the revenue gap — there was a lot of hand-waving, a lot of saying they would work with us,” says another executive. “Google on AMP was like Google on every product — lots of fanfare in the beginning, lots of grand plans, and then none of those plans ever saw the light of day.”
But the pageviews, in many cases, were enough to outweigh the costs. It’s almost impossible to overstate how important Google traffic is to most publishers. The analytics company Chartbeat estimated this year that search accounts for 19.3 percent of total traffic to websites, a number that doesn’t even include products like Google News and the news feed in the Google app, both of which also account for a huge portion of many publishers’ traffic. Google, as a whole, can account for up to 40 percent of traffic for even the largest sites. Disappearing from Google is life-and-death stuff.
Bigger media companies, those that could employ product and engineering staff of their own, could sometimes hack around AMP’s limitations — or, at the very least, deal with them without affecting the rest of the company’s business. Some big publishers came to see AMP as nothing more than some additional work required for a distributor. But even many smaller publishers, without the staff to manage the technical shortcomings or the resources to maintain yet another version of their website, still felt they had no choice but to support AMP.
As long as anyone played the game, everybody had to. “Google’s strategy is always to create prisoner’s dilemmas that it controls — to create a system such that if only one person defects, then they win,” a former media executive says. As long as anyone was willing to use AMP and get into that carousel, everyone else had to do the same or risk being left out.
Many within Google continued to see AMP as a net good, a way to make the web better and to keep it from collapsing into a few walled gardens. But to most publishers, AMP was, at best, just another app to send stuff to. “We didn’t see it as any different from building on Android or building on iOS,” one former media executive says. “It was this way to deliver the best mobile experience.” Supporting AMP was like supporting Apple News, Facebook Instant Articles, or even maintaining RSS feeds. It was just more work for more platforms.
That’s why the Top Stories carousel felt like a shakedown to so many publishers. Google claimed it was merely an incentive to do the obviously right thing and a nice boost in the user experience. But publishers sensed an unspoken message: comply with this new format or risk your precious search traffic. And your entire business.
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Good governance
Despite all the issues with AMP’s tech and misgivings about Google’s intentions, the new format was a success from the very beginning. By December 2016, less than a year after its official launch, an Adobe study found that AMP pages already accounted for 7 percent of mobile traffic to “top publishers” in the US and grew 405 percent in just the final eight months of the year. Microsoft was planning to use AMP in the Bing app for iOS and Android. Twitter was looking into using it as well.
From the beginning, Google had proclaimed loudly that AMP was not a Google product. It was to be an open-source platform, all its source code available on GitHub for anyone to fork and edit and use to their own ends. AMP’s success was the web’s success, not Google’s.
In reality, Google exerted near-total authority over AMP. According to the 2020 antitrust lawsuit against Google, the company adopted a “Benevolent Dictator For Life” policy, and even when it transferred the AMP project to the OpenJS Foundation in 2019, it remained very much in charge. “When it suited them, it was open-source,” says Jeremy Keith, a web developer and a former member of AMP’s advisory council. “But whenever there were any questions about direction and control… it was Google’s.”
Several sources told me stories of heated arguments about the future of the web that ended in Google employees awkwardly reading lawyer-approved statements about things being open and opt in — and Google then getting its way. After a debate about the cache, and the data it gave Google, “they started bringing a whole bunch of people no one had ever heard of to committee meetings to say how wonderful the cache was,” one media exec remembers. And whenever there was debate about new features or the roadmap, Google always won.
Over time, AMP began to support more ad networks — or, rather, more ad networks began to do the work required to support AMP’s locked-down structure. But many still felt the best experience was reserved for Google’s own ad tech. That fact has become the most contentious part of AMP’s history — and the reason it wound up in multiple antitrust lawsuits against Google. The suits allege, among other things, that Google used AMP as a way to curtail a practice called “header bidding,” which allows publishers to show their inventory to multiple ad exchanges at once in order to get the best price in real time. “Specifically,” the 2020 lawsuit says, “Google made AMP unable to execute JavaScript in the header, which frustrated publishers’ use of header bidding.” Google spokesperson Meghann Farnsworth said in a statement that “AG Paxton’s claims about AMP and header bidding are just false.” Most of the AMP-related provisions in that 2020 lawsuit were thrown out by a district court in 2022, which found that the case “does not plausible [sic] allege AMP to be an anticompetitive strategy.”
As AMP caught on, Google’s vision for the product became even more ambitious. The company started to suggest that, rather than maintain a website and a separate set of AMP pages, maybe some publishers should build their entire site within AMP. On launch day in October 2015, the AMP project website proudly proclaimed that it was “an architectural framework built for speed.” By the end of 2017, AMP was promising to enable “the creation of websites and ads that are consistently fast, beautiful and high-performing across devices and distribution platforms.” It was no longer just articles, and it was no longer just mobile. It was the whole web, rewritten Google’s way and forever compatible with its search engine.
“I 100 percent believe that Google would have loved to have said AMP is the future of HTML,” Eden says. “I have no doubt that the long-term play was to say, ‘We’re Google. This is a new language for the web. If you don’t like it, you’re not on the front page of Google anymore.’”
Ultimately, though, Google’s grandest ambitions didn’t come to pass. Neither did its smallest ambitions, really. As publishers continued to thrash against AMP’s constraints, and as overall scrutiny against Google ramped up, the company began to pull back.
The non-standard
In 2021, Google announced it would start featuring all pages in the Top Stories carousel, not just AMP-powered ones. Last May, Google let some local news providers for covid-related stories bypass this requirement. As soon as publishers didn’t have to use AMP anymore, they mostly stopped. The Washington Post abandoned it the same year, and a litany of others (including Vox Media) spent 2022 looking for ways off the platform. Even now, though, some of those publishers say they’re nervous about traffic disappearing. Google remains such a black box that it can be hard to trust the company, even as it continues to say it doesn’t factor AMP into results.
The true irony of AMP is that even as publishers are jumping off the platform, many also acknowledge that, actually, AMP is pretty good now. It supports comments and more interactive elements; it’s still fast and simple. Now that it’s run by the OpenJS Foundation and separated from the search results incentive, it appears to be on track to become a genuinely useful project. It’s not likely to replace HTML anytime soon, but it could help usher in the idea of portable and embeddable content that Jarvis and Gingras imagined all those years ago. Developers can even use AMP to make web-based projects that feel like Instagram Stories or the TikTok feed. “AMP potentially could have been — in some ways, I still think possibly could be — a really interesting way of syndicating content that takes that middle person out of the mix,” Pilhofer says.
Everyone I spoke to also thinks Core Web Vitals is a good and valuable idea, too. Speed matters more than ever; how you hit the mark doesn’t matter as much.
One source I spoke to wondered aloud if the internet might be a different place if the first versions of AMP had actually been good. Would publishers have thrown even more resources into supporting the format, giving Google even more control over how the web works — and, as the antitrust lawsuits allege, how it makes money? It certainly seems possible.
But one thing proved undeniable: for Google, there was simply no coming back from the first days of AMP, when publishers felt like the company was making grand pronouncements about saving the web while also force-feeding them bad products that served Google’s ends and no one else’s. Even Facebook Instant Articles and Apple News, constrained and problematic as they were, felt optional. AMP didn’t.
“It maybe had good intentions about making the mobile web better,” Adams says, “but went about it in probably one of the worst ways you could have imagined. It was a PR nightmare.”
One of the smartest and most profitable things Google ever did was align itself with the growth of the web. It offered useful free services, used projects like Fiber and Android to help get more people online, and made the sprawling internet a little easier for people to navigate. As the web grew, so did Google, both to great heights. But when the web was threatened by the rise of closed platforms, Google mortgaged many of its ideas about openness in order to make sure the profits kept coming. “And as a long-term effect, it probably woke a lot of news publishers up to the fact that Google is maybe not a benign entity,” Adams says. “And we need to take their dominance a bit more seriously as a news story in its own right.”
In response to this story, Google spokesperson Meghann Farnsworth said the company “will continue to collaborate with the industry to build technology that provides helpful experiences for users, delivers value to publishers and creators and helps contribute to a healthy ecosystem and the open web.”
Google is still the web’s biggest and most influential company. But across the publishing industry, it’s no longer seen as a partner. AMP ultimately neither saved nor killed the open web. But it did kill Google’s good name — one not-that-fast webpage at a time.
Casey Newton and Nilay Patel contributed reporting.
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