AMP is bad

With the goal of assisting site owners in improving page load time for mobile visitors, Google launched the AMP project in 2015. Google has been aggressive in pushing adoption via the open-source community, working with platform plugin developers as well as providing large brand sites with developer resources to implement the technology.

—Search Engine Land[^1]

Or,

… AMP allows Google to basically take over hosting the web as well. The Google AMP Cache will serve AMP pages instead of a website’s own hosting environment, and also allow Google to perform their own optimisations to further enhance user experience.

As a side benefit, it also allows Google full control over content monetisation.

Which interpretation is more convincing?

—Barry Adams[^2]

Why AMP is so fast:

Here we are on Google Search on mobile. … We scroll down in the results, in the bottom you can start to see the “Scientias” article …

At this moment, the network panel fills up with resources from that AMP page. Pretty much anything that page needs to render is preloaded, whether you actually open it not. If you do, it’s going to render instantly.

Not in 2–8s. Instantly. Technically, a clever trick. It’s hard to argue with that. Yet I consider it cheating and anti competitive behavior.

—Ferdy Christant[^3]