AMP in email is a terrible idea.

Google has just announced its e-mail upgrade plan using the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) platform, which will make email-based content “attractive, interactive and practical”. Does this still seem like a terrible idea to someone else? It seems to me exactly, and besides, this idea was born not on the basis of user needs, but on the basis of competition and existing leverage. This is very bad, Google, in the trash this idea.

You see, email belongs to a special class of services. Nobody likes e-mail - just like no one likes pavements, electrical outlets or plugs. Not that there was anything wrong with them. Simply, they have already developed enough and become useful things that do exactly what is required of them. They developed concepts of affection and hostility.

As evidence, think about how rarely you can find something that is different from the usual versions of these things. Moving sidewalks, strange sockets, spoon-plugs - they exist in some extreme niches like airports or food brand Lunchables . The originals remain unchanged for a thousand years, and this is no accident.

Email is a simple thing. This is a known value for any company, family and device. Implementation over the decades of its existence has changed, but the basic idea has remained the same from the very first email systems of the 60s and 70s, from the widespread standardization of the 90s and from the transition to the web platform in the 00s. Parallels with paper mail are lined up deliberately (this is a posting with the address), and simplicity has always been part of its work scheme (interoperability and privacy appeared later).

It does not belong to any company. It works reliably and correctly on any platform, in any OS, on any device. Today it is a rarity, and very valuable.

But technoindustry, on its way to super-profits, never interfered with elegance, history or interoperability (rest in peace, Google Reader), so this argument does not look strong. But still it was worth bringing.

Two things look more important: moat and moat.

The moat is laid between communications and applications. Communications say something, and applications interact with something. There are areas of their intersection, but such a thing as email is designed and in the overwhelming majority of cases is used to say something, and websites and applications are used in the vast majority of cases to interact with something.

Separating these concepts is useful at a fundamental level - just as it is useful to separate a book about fire and a book of cardboard matches. Emails are static because messages should be static. The whole point of messaging over the Internet is based on the telegraphic model of exchanging one-way packets with static content, just like the concept of a fork is based on piercing a piece of food and allowing friction to keep it in the process of transfer.

The moat between communications and actions is important because it makes it very clear what certain tools are capable of, allowing you to trust them and use them correctly.

We know that all email can do is tell you something (not counting the tracking pixels). It does not download anything, does not launch applications or scripts, attachments and other parts of it, unless these are images in HTML - which in itself is also disconnected. The entire message in the end will only be a large static piece of text sent to your address, possibly with a file in the trailer. Open it in a year or ten years - it will be the same letter.

It works both ways. Whatever you do with e-mail, with its help you can only tell something by writing another letter. If you want to do something, you leave the email alone and do it on the other side of the pit.

This is the greatest advantage and the curse of email - with its help you can only exchange messages. This is not always the best solution, but rarely - the worst. If you need something more complicated, you use something else: a chat application, a video call, file hosting. These useful things are often located next to email, sometimes integrated, but never part of it. And this is good. The maximum that you can count on is to automatically add something to the calendar or pick up information about the flight. But in the end it's just reading the text.

Google wants us to build a bridge across this ditch, and that applications run inside email — albeit limited, but, by definition, belonging to the world on the other side of the ditch.

What for? Do we run out of tabs? People complained that clicking on the "Yes" button in a letter marked RSVP [répondez s'il vous plaît - please reply / approx. trans.] sends them to the site? Did they ask for a video chat window with a link to open inside the email? Not. Nobody needs that. This aspect of the email does not interfere with anyone (overloading the Inbox is another problem), and no one will gain anything from it.

Almost nobody. And here we come to the motive.

AMP is Google's use of its market power to increase control over other people's content. This makes Facebook, so Google has to do it. Use the privileged position, the means to search for content, Google is trying to make the content itself become part of its system.

“AMP began as an attempt to help publishers, but over time its capabilities have expanded, and now this is one of the best ways to create web pages,” the company writes in a blog announcing AMP for Gmail. No, it is not. AMP is a way to adapt and deliver, on Google terms, real web pages created with real tools.

The excuse that the mobile web is too slow is rather beaten, and the solution to this problem in the form of a specially developed Google web system obviously only benefits Google itself. It’s just as if the seller of bottled drinking water was telling you that water flows too slowly from your tap.

AMP for email is just a continuation of this principle. People are constantly leaving Gmail to the pages of airlines, online stores, social networks and other places. Places that have created their own user environment, their own analytics, their own processes that may be visible or not visible, useful or not useful for Google.

But if these daily tasks occur inside Gmail, Google will gain control over the smallest details, and will determine what companies can and cannot do inside the email system - instead of using the natural limitations of email, which is not a bug, but features .

And as if this is not enough, another property is being promoted, in essence, the most avid of all that the company did. Dynamic email content. Where have I heard about this? Oh yes, this is the whole business model for providing free email from Google. Advertising.

What is the majority of live content on the web that needs to constantly access the home server and update on its own? Not articles like this, not videos, not songs — these are only resources that you have requested. Not chats and email. Yes, there are, of course, cloud tools for work - shared documents. But the biggest part, 99.9% is advertising.

Advertising and tracking services that adapt to their surrounding content, to visitor data they know, and to the latest prices and discounts. This is how Google wants to “modernize” your Inbox.

Do the words “attractive, interactive, and practical” sound differently to you now? Do not use it, do not encourage it. AMP and other similar initiatives are already parasitic on the web, and they will turn out to be just as bad for email.