Google is really losing its way. AMP always looked like an attempt to appify the Web on Google's platform, and that URL scheme makes it even more worrying.
When your AMP pages appear in Google's Search results, users aren't visiting your site. They are visiting a restricted shell of your site on google.com with functionality that benefits Google, not the website owner (examples: a back button to google.com, left-right swipes that take users off of your site, restricted monetization options, pages that don't display for 8 seconds if you block potentially-dangerous 3rd party scripts, etc.).
Is there no one left at Google who still believes in an independent, decentralized Web? The open WWW has always been under attack, but to see it fundamentally wrecked by Google is depressing.
The fact that you have to surrender full control of your own site and content to be featured by Google is criminal.
They don't own the web.
They could improve their indexing to handle more of the web, but instead they're trying to shift the cost of indexing to people who publish on the web. The small guy. Not the near trillion dollar company.
To me, it looks more like Google has just become emboldened enough to start openly abusing their position to gain control of the web. This has always been Google's way, it's just that they dressed it up in prettier PR speak previously or tried to do it more quietly to keep the "we're not evil" wool pulled over the eyes of most of the population.
I agree generally with what you're saying, but I think they once at least tried to not be "evil". I don't think they are trying very hard any more.
They were willing to give RSS/Atom a crippling blow at the launch of Google Plus.
I remember Usenet going downhill immediately after they started pulling it into Google Groups (an unusable discussion platform).
I suspect that it will be the end of the WWW if Google is successful with AMP and the removal of URLs. Something new will have to be created from the ashes, though it may be difficult if Google controls the hardware, software (browser, OS), and potentially the network.
Google is motivated by getting people to click on ads. That's why Google Chrome's URL auto-completion is so bad -- you're supposed to go to Google Search on the way to your destination and click on well-concealed ads. I'm guessing that somewhere in the plan to hide URLs is a scheme to get people to depend more on search (to click on ads) and less on going directly to the destination. With AMP, the search and the destination are both google.com.
When your AMP pages appear in Google's Search results, users aren't visiting your site. They are visiting a restricted shell of your site on google.com with functionality that benefits Google, not the website owner (examples: a back button to google.com, left-right swipes that take users off of your site, restricted monetization options, pages that don't display for 8 seconds if you block potentially-dangerous 3rd party scripts, etc.).
Is there no one left at Google who still believes in an independent, decentralized Web? The open WWW has always been under attack, but to see it fundamentally wrecked by Google is depressing.