Tag: Amp

Jeremy has been thinking about when the ends justify the means, a topic I’ve been thinking about a lot as of late as well.

When do the ends justify the means? Isn’t the whole point of having principles that they hold true even in the direst circumstances? Why even claim that corporations shouldn’t influence politics if you’re going to make an exception for net neutrality? Why even claim that free speech is sacrosanct if you make an exception for nazi scum?

Those two examples are pretty extreme and I can easily justify the exceptions to myself. Net neutrality is too important. Stopping fascism is too important. But where do I draw the line? At what point does something become “too important?”

It’s a lovely post that connects dots between censorship, AMP, HTTPS as a requirement for new features and more.

Ethan was inspired by an Ursula Franklin lecture (I really have to read that book) to write a bit more about what we, as a community, can do about AMP. It looks a bit grim, as he points out.

And today, right now, I don’t think we need to look further than AMP to see an example of what Franklin’s talking about. As of this moment, the power dynamics are skewed pretty severely in favor of Google’s proprietary AMP standard, and against those of us who’d ask this question: What can I do about AMP?

But he goes on to point out that we can, and should, still speak up about our concerns and rally together:

That doesn’t mean it’s not worth speaking up, individually and collectively, and writing about our concerns. Quite the opposite. In fact, that’s why I signed an open letter on AMP, alongside twenty other concerned colleagues. (If you or your organization has a GitHub account, you can sign it, too.) Perhaps together, we can make the issue more visible, and make more people and organizations aware of our concerns. So while there might not be much I can do about AMP, maybe there’s something we can do.