From AMP to Signed Exchanges, Or How Innovation Happens at Cloudflare

In 2015, Facebook introduced Instant Articles, a format allowing publishers to serve their content directly from Facebook's infrastructure. This was followed by Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) initiative in October of the same year. These initiatives posed a threat to the open web and raised concerns about the concentration of power within these tech giants. However, they also aimed to address performance issues on mobile devices, particularly in developing countries where internet access is often slow or expensive. In response to this situation, Cloudflare set up an Emerging Technologies & Incubation (ETI) team in 2016, led by Dane Knecht. The ETI team was tasked with working on strategic projects with a long payoff time horizon and fostering innovation within the company. This team has been responsible for developing several successful products, such as Cloudflare for Teams, 1.1.1.1, and Workers. In collaboration with Google's AMP team, Cloudflare developed Signed Exchanges, a technology that combines the benefits of AMP (faster page loading) while giving back control over content to individual publishers. This innovation helps build a better internet by making web pages faster and more accessible, even in areas with slow or expensive internet access. The ETI team continues to explore new technologies and ideas, fostering a culture of continuous innovation at Cloudflare. Their work on Signed Exchanges demonstrates the importance of collaboration and open standards in driving meaningful progress in the field of internet performance optimization.