Have you heard of Google AMP? That stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages, and it’s a way of making webpages so that they load faster and display more efficiently on mobile devices. Oh, and it puts your website under Google’s control. Polemic Digital has an explanarant (that’s part explanation, part rant) on AMP making the case not to adopt it. It’s an interesting read, and here’s a taste:

AMP allows Google to basically take over hosting the web as well. The Google AMP Cache will serve AMP pages instead of a website’s own hosting environment, and also allow Google to perform their own optimisations to further enhance user experience.

As a side benefit, it also allows Google full control over content monetisation. No more rogue ad networks, no more malicious ads, all monetisation approved and regulated by Google. If anything happens that falls outside of the AMP standard’s restrictions, the page in question simply becomes AMP-invalid and is ejected from the AMP cache – and subsequently from Google’s results. At that point the page might as well not exist any more.

All you scientists and Mark Watney (The Martian) fans: need some pocket change? “Looking to turn carbon from the planet Mars into useful compounds such as sugar, NASA is offering up to a cool $1 million to anyone who can solve how to accomplish such a process.” Sure beats potatoes, grown the Watney way. What a sweet challenge.