Google decentralizes the AMP framework to adopt an open governance model

On Tuesday, Google announced that it would invite other industry insiders to set up the “Technical Steering Committee” (TSC) and the Advisory Committee (AC) Working Groups of the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) open source project. Develop and promote AMP through a more open governance model. It is no longer up to Google’s internal decision to develop AMP to eliminate outside concerns about AMP.

Google AMP, launched in 2016, speeds mobile users’ access to web pages, improves layout, and reduces elements and ads. To date, there are more than 850,000 domains and platforms, and more than 100 home technology vendors use AMP.

However, AMP has always been a big controversy. Google actively promotes AMP, and in July this year, “page load speed” was included in the action search ranking. Although Google emphasises that it does not favour AMP, it is still seen as an indirect promotion of AMP. On the other hand, the easiest way for a website provider to set up an AMP system is to pass content to users through Google’s cache server, which is equivalent to blocking traffic from content providers. Besides, the AMP format standard is dominated by Google. Let the outside world worry that AMP will become Google’s authoritarian format.

In fact, since the advent of AMP, there have been 710 contributors worldwide, with only 22% of Google employees and 78% from companies such as Twitter, Pinterest, Yahoo and eBay.

Malte Ubl, head of AMP, said that the governance model decided by him alone is not enough to cope with the existing ecological scale, so he hopes to incorporate the opinions of the community and other users, and let AMP move toward an open governance model.

Also, Malte Ubl reiterated that Google would move the AMP project to the Open Source Foundation in the future, as to the decision of the newly established TSC and AC.