At the beginning of February, an article was posted describing Google adding engineers to work on the WordPress core and ecosystem.
Google is looking to push for faster speeds for mobile across the web. Sounds good right? Well, to do this, it seems they are really pushing Accelerated Mobile Pages Project (AMP). While it has been shown an effective boost for mobile browsing, it also means that your content will be served on Googles network instead of your own.
There is a divide in what people are saying about this. While large companies and corporate people in charge are yelling it’s faster, they are only looking at that aspect of it, and not accounting for anything else. There are more and more people stating this is a bad thing.
Matthew Ingram of Fortune:
“In a nutshell, these publishers are afraid that while the AMP project is nominally open-source, Google is using it to shape how the mobile web works, and in particular, to ensure a steady stream of advertising revenue… More than anything else, the concerns that some publishers have about AMP seems to be part of a broader fear about the loss of control over distribution in a platform-centric world, and the risks that this poses to traditional monetization methods such as display advertising”
There is an even bigger concern for the security aspect of AMP and standardizing of content. Phishing sites and attempts will theoretically be easier to implement and harder to distinguish. Due to the use of the same visual ques, “All publishers end up looking more similar than different. That makes separating the real from the fake even harder” ~Kyle Chayka.
This is further solidified when, back in September 2017, Russian hackers, team “Fancy Bear”, used AMP with emails to steal Gmail passwords. Yes, concerning indeed.
With the whole AMP controversy, there is still a light at the end of the tunnel. Whether the goal is to push AMP or to really just try and make the web a better place, WordPress is a target for development. The more eyes and active developers, both Google engineers and the thousands of other developers, working on the WordPress core and ecosystem, the better.