Good news: Google no longer requires publishers to use the AMP format. Bad news: What replaces it might be worse

Scott Gilbertson at The Register on why Core Web Vitals is just another move that supposedly improves the web for everyone, but ultimately serves only to give Google more control over the web:

In the end AMP and Core Web Vitals boil down to a very simple reality: Google is again using its dominance in the search business to force everyone to play on its terms. Whether that’s a proprietary markup language or some arbitrary set of performance standards, the end result is the same. Google is a monopoly and it is using its monopoly position to force the rest of the web into doing what it wants.

Google AMP and its successor are classic examples that could have been pulled from another monopoly’s playbook: embrace, extend, and extinguish. The difference is that Google is being much more clever about how it extinguishes things than Microsoft ever was. Google embraced HTML, then extended it with AMP and now, in claiming to have extinguished AMP, it gets the control it wants without the bad press. The slight twist in the extinguish move is a nice touch, Google. Well played.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. The power of the web lies in its decentralisation, it lies with its messiness, it lies with its edge nodes – that is, with you and me. We rejected AMP, it may be fading, but we need to keep rejecting. If we reject Core Web Vitals, it too will die.

I increasingly feel that Google as a whole should be treated as an obstacle to be routed around, if not outright excised.