Google Wants To Upgrade Email with AMP For More Interactive Services

Do you have an email address or do you have a Gmail address? At first glance they may seem the same, but many of the decisions Google has made over the years imply that the company's vision for its messaging tool has little to do with the standard we have used since the beginning of the 70.

Google threatens to complicate the internal operations that makes it possible for anyone to send a message to another on the network. The last step in this direction was announced this week. The network giant will bring AMP technology (Accelerated Mobile Pages), designed to lighten the load of content on mobile devices, to emails.

The idea is relatively simple. Nowadays email messages are full of content that forces us to abandon the mail application and open the web browser. The messages can contain images and some HTML code, yes, but no interactive element, so it is necessary to leave the mail client to perform any useful action.
Google hopes to solve it with the possibilities offered by AMP. "Actions such as sending a confirmation of attendance to an event, scheduling an appointment or completing a questionnaire directly from the e-mail message can be quickly carried out," says the company on the announcement page.
The first draft of this implementation is already available and some companies, such as Booking or Pinterest, have already begun testing it. Google expects to introduce support for these messages natively in Gmail over the next few months.

The problem with this idea is that it has no support in the current standards governing e-mail today. Each email client will have to adapt to show these emails correctly.
AMP is theoretically an open source proposal but in reality it is a standard controlled by Google, an attempt to modernize the foundations of the network to adapt them not to the needs of the users, but to those of the company itself.
This is problematic on the web. Since its initial announcement, AMP has created tensions between publishing companies - to which the tool was originally targeted - and Google for the degree of control it exerts over the ecosystem.

The problem is that Gmail has a huge market share, with more than 1 billion active users worldwide. He has managed to sink the email market for any company that does not offer a free service and along the way has become a key part of the digital identity of most Internet users (think how many services we are discharged with this email as a form of identification or security address to retrieve a password).
A change in the way Gmail works, therefore, threatens to destabilize the e-mail infrastructure around the world and sets a dangerous precedent.

Yes, there are ways to escape and other mail services available - many for payment - but it is a complex process and may eventually be useless. If Google gets its way, these clients and mail applications will have to show the AMP content of the messages or risk alienating a good number of its users.