TY - GEN
T1 - On the potential of Google AMP to promote local content in developing regions
AU - Phokeer, Amreesh
AU - Chavula, Josiah
AU - Johnson, David
AU - Densmore, Melissa
AU - Tyson, Gareth
AU - Sathiaseelan, Arjuna
AU - Feamster, Nick
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 IEEE.
PY - 2019/5/9
Y1 - 2019/5/9
N2 - The Google Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project has gained lot of interest from content providers as a means to improve user experience. It introduces a number of innovations to streamline the downloading, parsing and rendering of pages. Google recently announced the hosting of more than 2B+ web pages, covering more than 900K domains. Due to the constrained nature of Internet connectivity in developing regions, AMP offers particularly exciting potential for improving web user experience in these countries. This paper provides a first look at Google's AMP performance in Africa. We start by outlining the current web infrastructure provisioning in Africa, using local news websites as a case study. Discovering a sparse and low performance environment, we then evaluate the benefits that AMP can introduce in terms of accessibility to local content in developing regions. This study reveals that in Africa, AMP is able to reduce page load time and page size by a factor of 3 and 8 respectively. However, AMP is not a neutral technology as the search engine favours content that is using Google AMP. This raises an important question of search neutrality.
AB - The Google Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project has gained lot of interest from content providers as a means to improve user experience. It introduces a number of innovations to streamline the downloading, parsing and rendering of pages. Google recently announced the hosting of more than 2B+ web pages, covering more than 900K domains. Due to the constrained nature of Internet connectivity in developing regions, AMP offers particularly exciting potential for improving web user experience in these countries. This paper provides a first look at Google's AMP performance in Africa. We start by outlining the current web infrastructure provisioning in Africa, using local news websites as a case study. Discovering a sparse and low performance environment, we then evaluate the benefits that AMP can introduce in terms of accessibility to local content in developing regions. This study reveals that in Africa, AMP is able to reduce page load time and page size by a factor of 3 and 8 respectively. However, AMP is not a neutral technology as the search engine favours content that is using Google AMP. This raises an important question of search neutrality.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85066501751&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85066501751&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/COMSNETS.2019.8711393
DO - 10.1109/COMSNETS.2019.8711393
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85066501751
T3 - 2019 11th International Conference on Communication Systems and Networks, COMSNETS 2019
SP - 80
EP - 87
BT - 2019 11th International Conference on Communication Systems and Networks, COMSNETS 2019
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
T2 - 11th International Conference on Communication Systems and Networks, COMSNETS 2019
Y2 - 7 January 2019 through 11 January 2019
ER -