• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, October 8, 2015

In a way, it’s all quite flattering for publishers. All the major online players are battling to either host their content or help deliver it faster,  an open acknowledgement that such content is what their users want. In that sense, the publishers have the power that comes from controlling supply.

But nothing is simple in the age of platforms. With each new partnership, concerns mount that publishers are also ceding control over their business.

The latest contender to enter the ring is Google, which unveiled its new AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) initiative to dramatically decrease the load times for Web content on mobile devices. The initiative, due to launch next year, centers on AMP HTML, a new open framework based on the ubiquitous Web coding language.

Google has already signed up around 30 publishing partners to experiment with AMP, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed and Vox. On the tech side, Google said AMP will be integrated by Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn and WordPress, among others.

By simplifying mobile page formats and opening Google’s cache servers free of charge, AMP aims to have mobile Web pages load instantly, making them comparable with apps.

According to Google images, video, and animations will all load just as fast as ads -- that is, instantly -- across all types of devices. Unlike Facebook Instant Articles AMP is available to everyone on the Web and is open source, so anyone can tinker with the code and build additional services on it.

The AMP initiative is Google’s response to the rise of ad blocking, which obviously threatens publishers as well as its own ad-supported business. The popularity of ad blocking software is due, in large part, to the fact that mobile ads use up data bandwidth, slowing delivery of the content that people actually want to see. It also promises to deal with the related, and very annoying, phenomenon of the bouncing Web page, with big ads starting to download only after you try to start scrolling lower on the page.

However, tech types were quick to point a number of caveats. Publishers will almost certainly have to overhaul their own online advertising infrastructure and rework relationships with ad tech firms, since AMP threatens to sideline important elements like analytics.

Furthermore, while Google says it won’t favor AMP content in search results, download speeds are already built into its search algorithms, suggesting that AMP content will naturally rise to the top, even if not explicitly promoted by Google. In other words Google isn’t giving publishers much of a choice: they can either adopt AMP HTML or gradually (or maybe not so gradually) see their search ranking sink relative to AMPed competitors. Once again publishers are being presented with a fait accompli by a big online platform -- a grating but by now familiar experience.

There’s no denying AMP leaves the publishers more control than Facebook’s Instant Articles. But in the end, it’s a choice between an overbearing spouse who tells you what to do for your own good, and an obsessive one who wants to keep you locked in a walled garden. While neither of these may seem like great options, it’s the price publishers pay for something that happened long ago, with the advent of the Internet itself -- the loss of control over distribution.