Resigning from the AMP advisory committee

Inspired by Terence Eden���s example, I applied for membership of the AMP advisory committee last year. To my surprise, my application was successful.

I���ve spent the time since then participating in good faith, but I can���t do that any longer. Here���s what I wrote in my resignation email:

Hi all,

As mentioned at the end of the last call, I���m stepping down from the AMP advisory committee.

I can���t in good faith continue to advise on the AMP project for the OpenJS Foundation when it has become clear to me that AMP remains a Google product, with only a subset of pieces that could even be considered open source.

If I were to remain on the advisory committee, my feelings of resentment about this situation would inevitably affect my behaviour. So it���s best for everyone if I step away now instead of descending into outright sabotage. It���s not you, it���s me.

I���d like to thank the OpenJS Foundation for allowing me to participate. It���s been an honour to watch Tobie and Jory in action.

I wish everyone well and I hope that the advisory committee can successfully guide the AMP project towards a happy place where it can live out its final days in peace.

I don���t have a replacement candidate to nominate but I���ll ask around amongst other independent sceptical folks to see if there���s any interest.

All the best,

Jeremy

I wrote about the fundamental problem with Google AMP when I joined the advisory committee:

This is an interesting time for AMP ���whatever AMP is.

See, that���s been a problem with Google AMP from the start. There are multiple defintions of what AMP is.

There���s the collection of web components. If that were all AMP is, it would be a very straightforward project, similar to other collections of web components (like Polymer). But then there���s the concept of validation. The validation comes from a set of rules, defined by Google. And there���s the AMP cache, or more accurately, Google hosting.

Only one piece of that trinity���the collection of web components���is eligible for the label of being open source, and even that���s a stretch considering that most of the contributions come from full-time Google employees. The other two parts are firmly under Google���s control.

I was hoping it was a marketing problem. We spent a lot of time on the advisory committee trying to figure out ways of making it clearer what AMP actually is. But it was a losing battle. The phrase ���the AMP project��� is used to cover up the deeply interwingled nature of its constituent parts. Bits of it are open source, but most of it is proprietary. The OpenJS Foundation doesn���t seem like a good home for a mostly-proprietary project.

Whenever a representative from Google showed up at an advisory committee meeting, it was clear that they viewed AMP as a Google product. I never got the impression that they planned to hand over control of the project to the OpenJS Foundation. Instead, they wanted to hear what people thought of their project. I���m not comfortable doing that kind of unpaid labour for a large profitable organisation.

Even worse, Google representatives reminded us that AMP was being used as a foundational technology for other Google products: stories, email, ads, and even some weird payment thing in native Android apps. That���s extremely worrying.

While I was serving on the AMP advisory committee, a coalition of attorneys general filed a suit against Google for anti-competitive conduct:

Google designed AMP so that users loading AMP pages would make direct communication with Google servers, rather than publishers��� servers. This enabled Google���s access to publishers��� inside and non-public user data.

We were immediately told that we could not discuss an ongoing court case in the AMP advisory committee. That���s fair enough. But will it go both ways? Or will lawyers acting on Google���s behalf be allowed to point to the AMP advisory committee and say, ���But AMP is an open source project! Look, it even resides under the banner of the OpenJS Foundation.���

If there���s even a chance of the AMP advisory committee being used as a Potempkin village, I want no part of it.

But even as I���m noping out of any involvement with Google AMP, my parting words have to be about how impressed I am with the OpenJS Foundation. Jory and Tobie have been nothing less than magnificent in their diplomacy, cat-herding, schedule-wrangling, timekeeping, and other organisational superpowers that I���m crap at.

I sincerely hope that Google isn���t taking advantage of the OpenJS Foundation���s kind-hearted trust.