Neither of those points are much of a defense. By that same token, one could defend e.g. Microsoft's aggressive misuse of their market dominance in the 90's: 'W

Neither of those points are much of a defense. By that same token, one could defend e.g. Microsoft's aggressive misuse of their market dominance in the 90's: 'Windows survived because of its obvious value; MS is just making ends meet.' It can still be a good or a bad thing for the web as a platform. Hopefully adoption is slow enough that the default behavior of any "blessed" libraries like this WP plugin can be encouraged to be less ... well, not evil, of course ... but really, why does that toolbar and 'X' need to be there? Browsers have a back button. My take is simply that this is not a good look for Google, and hopefully they realize that. The article featuring the WP plugin, and these discussions on HN that give a lot of attention to the carousel, and how it competes with non-AMP results, don't build goodwill for the project.