Thread · 6 tweets · 16 Oct 2022

(Sorry, not on the Internet much this weekend.) I'm not implying that this is necessarily intentional, but open governance takes more than just going through the motions, what matters is whether the governance is open in practice (there are other ways to control things).

In the case of AMP, I speak from the perspective of a team with representation on both the AC and TSC, experience contributing code to the project, and decades of open source & open standards work. I'm just noting this to make it clear that it wasn't from lack of understanding.

In one instance we sought a simple change to enable CCPA opt outs. General AC agreement, TSC support. But we were told that the change wouldn't be accepted without Google's approval (and discouraged from making a PR). It eventually happened, but it took months.

In another, we wanted the AC to *recommend* a sunset of the cache. The goal was precisely to make the independence of AMP real, to cut off Google's power plays, to make it clear that AMP was *only* about good practices to make fast pages and should compete with React.

A majority of the AC agreed, but the situation turned into a continuous stonewalling of Google engineers reading legal-vetted statements. I've never had as strong an impression that I'd leant against the wrong wall in a Potemkin village.

Anyway, again, I'm not ascribing this to malice but the facts of AMP governance are: if what you want isn't a Google priority, it'll be slow; if what you want goes against Google, it doesn't matter how many elected AC folks agree it'll get blocked.