There is always the trade-off between higher quality through what is essentially regulation and standards and squeezing out those who don't comply (which disadvantages new entrants).
With drugs, we weight that trade-off heavily towards higher quality over new entrants. The question is, is that an acceptable trade off on the web?
Reading this, I now think I should go put AMP on my personal blog. Before that, I needed an HTTPS cert. Before that, I needed to confirm I owned the site to Google.
All things which may make the web better, but it certainly increases the operational burden and may discourage others from bothering in the first place.
Push a static site to netlify for free and all of this is taken care of you for free.
The burden is necessary given the proliferation of bad actors
I would not recommend AMP, but there are dozens of standards that are not part of what the public sees, low level enough they don't care to see. These are the important things Google has caused the world to adopt as best practices. You don't have to have http, but you are telling users you don't care about their security. This was largely pushed by green/red indicators in the URL bar.
> Push a static site to netlify for free and all of this is taken care of you for free. The burden is necessary given the proliferation of bad actors
This heavily pushes the web toward centralization, which I see as a really bad thing, in many ways the cure is worse than the disease. It's happening in so many ways (have you tried standing up your own email server?) and this sort of thing drives it the hardest.
I don't think Google is all bad, in fact I appreciate a lot of what they have done for the world (you mention some of these things). But as with nearly everything in life, it's complicated. I worry a lot that we're headed towards an internet where the individual is at the mercy of organizations to allow them to have a voice.
> The burden is necessary given the proliferation of bad actors
But the bad actors don't really abuse technical standards. They abuse links. The only part in Google's list of criteria that has largely remained untouched in the last two decades and is still the factor for ranking. So much so, that I'm confident that, if ranking factor relevance was a search result, the first page would just be the same result over and over: Links.
That's the reason for the centralization of power: those with more links will be ranked on the top, will have more visibility and, you guessed it, get more links. Guess what happens: they then start to sell either links or they rent out subdomains and folders on their website.
Google, as a company, does not care about bad actors. Some teams in Google do, but they are not the ones setting the policies.
With drugs, we weight that trade-off heavily towards higher quality over new entrants. The question is, is that an acceptable trade off on the web?
Reading this, I now think I should go put AMP on my personal blog. Before that, I needed an HTTPS cert. Before that, I needed to confirm I owned the site to Google.
All things which may make the web better, but it certainly increases the operational burden and may discourage others from bothering in the first place.