&gt; Internet is plentiful enough that we don&#x27;t need to scrape and squeeze every last kilobyte.<p>For you and I, perhaps. For the people on 2G&#x2F;3G or worse, trying to read a simple article, modern web pages are hilariously heavy. The whole point of the web was openness. This is why Facebook, Apple and Google have all developed their own solutions to this problem: FB Instant Articles; iOS News app; Google Accelerated Mobile Pages.<p>If these companies are taking it seriously enough to develop solutions, there must be a real problem or serious sections of the market being missed&#x2F;obstructed by the failure of publishers to build their websites <i>responsibly</i>.<p>And in general, no matter that heavy pages can still load quickly for me on my privileged broadband connection, it still pisses me off when it takes 3-5 seconds for a page to load when I know it should fundamentally take a second (or less) to show me text and some associated images whenever they&#x27;re in the viewport.<p>Google AMP is the best solution for the web so far, but it&#x27;s a step backwards to XHTML&#x2F;WAP and mobile subdomain sites. The correct thing would have been to hit websites with genuine SEO penalties for shit mobile performance. This is especially true because AMP doesn&#x27;t even work on older mobile browsers.<p>The biggest reason why the web needs to care about every single byte of overhead? Because native apps barely have this problem. Neither side, native or web, is going to simply be killed by this, but the value of websites and web apps will decrease if they do not prove to be viable vehicles for content.