AMP for Email Is a Terrible Idea ⇥ techcrunch.com

Devin Coldewey, TechCrunch:

The excuse that the mobile web isn’t fast enough is threadbare, and the solution of a special Google-designed sub-web transparently self-serving. It’s like someone who sells bottled water telling you your tap runs too slow.

AMP for email is just an extension of that principle. People leave Gmail all the time to go to airline webpages, online shops, social media, and other places. Places that have created their own user environments, with their own analytics, their own processes that may or may not be beneficial or even visible to Google. Can’t have that!

But if these everyday tasks take place inside Gmail, Google exerts control over the intimate details, defining what other companies can and can’t do inside the email system — rather than using the natural limitations of email, which I hasten to reiterate are a feature, not a bug.

If AMP is, indeed, a new thing for the open web — as Google has framed it — then it should be entirely separated from Google’s control and submitted to standards bodies for a more democratic development process. I have zero expectations of them doing so.