Google leadership panel (AMP Conf '19)

[MUSIC PLAYING] MONISHA VARADAN: Good morning, everyone. Or maybe it's afternoon. Maybe it's evening, or even late night, for some of you on Livestream. Welcome. Welcome to the Google panel. For the next 30 minutes, we have a chance to ask our leaders all sorts of questions. Now, as some of you may know, Google has been instrumental in the creation of AMP, and now actually employs a full-time team to contribute to the open-source project. And as you all know, AMP helps publishers be successful

on the web. So we thought it was appropriate to ask our leaders-- who can now come on-- their thoughts on Google, AMP, how Google thinks about the content ecosystem, and the future of content experiences on the web. Thank you, panelists, for joining us today. So let me start by introducing the team. We have with us David-- or Bez-- who is the VP of engineering for our search

product and the executive sponsor for AMP at Google, Ryoichi, who is our engineering director and the site lead for Google Japan, Dion, who heads-- director of web developer relations, and finally, Malte-- who needs no introduction, because you know him from the keynote-- is our tech lead for AMP. My name is Monisha, and I lead web partnerships for APAC. So thank you so much for sending in all the questions. We've received all of them. And we've tried to pick the ones that have been voted the highest.

We've also tried to pick the ones that are most relevant for most of you in this room, and the ones, of course, that are suitable for this leadership panel. So let's kick off with the first question, which is fairly pertinent, and I've been asked this a few times. "Is there a risk that Google will abandon AMP like it has with some of its high-profile projects?" [LAUGHTER] MALTE UBL: So I can-- I'll give a technical answer to this. So, I mean, I think the-- as the technical lead, I have to anticipate

that no software lasts forever. And so there's all kinds of safeguards built into the-- to outlast even Google, Incorporated, basically, as a company. Because it's, first of all, an open-source project that is licensed under an Apache 2 license. And so if Google, for whatever reason, would decide to stop working on it, it would still be there, and folks could continue working on it.

And then there's other, I think, thoughtful aspects to it. So for example, the AMP Cache's URL format is designed such that you can actually just turn it into a redirect to the underlying document with an Apache rewrite rule. You don't even need a database. And so it's extremely easy to maintain backwards compatibility of the URL space into eternity, independent of the existence of the entities that used to run these URLs. So the-- I think that's the technical answer that

anticipates possible futures without making a comment about possible futures. MONISHA VARADAN: Is there a nontechnical answer anyone wants to have a go at? DAVID BRESBIS: Sure. We are obviously very committed to AMP. It's something that we really believe very strongly in, primarily because, if you look at the way we view Google Search, which is one of the most, obviously, important projects at Google-- one of the most important products we have, when the user comes to us with a question, it's really the entire end-to-end journey

that we optimize for. And it's not just enough to make our part of the journey, our applications and our website super fast, we need the entire journey to be fast, the entire journey to be an excellent experience. Which means your sites have to be great, too. So we have a long history of investing in the web, investing in everything from training to making our own browser with Chrome, to doing things like AMP on the format side-- tools. We strongly believe in a high-performance and modern, mobile-friendly web.