DuckDuckGo and Brave will now block Google AMP pages, here is why it is important

In the digital world, user data is gold and technology behemoths empowering several digital services know that better than anyone else. This is also why some of their practices, as trivial as they may seem to the end-user, are often collecting user data in the background. Web browsers Brave and DuckDuckGo, both known for their focus on user privacy, now aim to challenge one such well-established practice by Google - Google AMP.

Brave has launched a new "De-AMP" feature for its browser and Android app, which will help block Google's AMP tracking whenever a user visits a website. Simultaneously, DuckDuckGo has also announced similar functionality across all of its apps and extensions, in order to protect users against AMP tracking. As can be understood, the common goal is to protect users from Google's data collection through AMP pages.

For those unaware, Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP is an open-source initiative kickstarted by Google in 2015. The feature is meant to create a lighter version of a website so that it loads instantly on mobiles and other on-the-go devices. We can often see AMP pages featured on mobile search as part of rich results and carousels, at times with a lightning bolt symbol next to them or with a Google-based URL upon opening the article.

So why block AMP?

While the primary benefit of AMP is that of a faster browsing experience, there has been a substantial outcry against the feature. Privacy pundits like Brave and DuckDuckGo have often highlighted how AMP grants Google access to much more user data than was possible before. Since AMP hosts webpages on Google's servers, it allows for tracking of user activity through the webpage, even while users may be under the pretext that they are interacting with the original website. In its new blog, Brave highlights how this confusion can also lead to security issues through AMP.

Even developers have sounded the alarm against AMP. The central reason for this is header bidding, an advertising practice followed by website publishers which lets them place their ad inventory on numerous ad exchanges simultaneously. With this, website owners can earn more revenue from their webpage by simply allotting an ad spot to the highest bidder.

Google's AMP kills that possibility. Since it does not support JavaScript, developers cannot host header bidding to gain top dollars and are instead, stuck within Google's ad ecosystem for their revenue from AMP-hosted pages. Google's argument [as per its blog]- header bidding takes place within the browser of a computer or mobile, so it requires more data and makes websites load slower. Google even announced "Open Bidding" as an alternate, wherein developers can hold a similar auction "within the ad server." Though it leaves developers with little no over the auction and hence, the subsequent revenue.

How will AMP blocking work?

Brave, in its blog, specifies that its De-AMP will be enabled by default across its versions. The feature will work in three ways. One, it will modify fetched pages, like those from Google Search, to point the users to the original publisher's webpage and not the Google AMP one. Second, the Brave browser will also check for AMP-ified code on web pages. In case it spots an AMP page being loaded, Brave's De-AMP will "stop loading the current page and instead load the "true" version of the page," before the page is rendered.

In addition, Brave also plans to introduce a third way to block AMP, wherein it will extend its existing "debouncing feature" to detect when AMP URLs are about to be visited. It will then take users to the true version of the page instead.

DuckDuckGo has not specified how its anti-AMP feature will work, though we can expect it to employ similar methods for the functionality. In any case, it looks like some concrete steps are being taken against Google's AMP and it remains to be seen how Google will react to this.