This post seems to conflate two ideas (1) AMP being an insufficient implementation (update-ping not working, and that being an awkward pattern anyways) and (2)

This post seems to conflate two ideas (1) AMP being an insufficient implementation (update-ping not working, and that being an awkward pattern anyways) and (2) AMP being actively harmful to the web ecosystem in principle. (1) Comments on the implementation I don't know nearly enough to contest. It's a new technology, and will take a lot of changes in and out of Google to get right. It's also early days - continue raising a stink about things like this and I expect it to get better quick. (2) The principle of AMP leads to a very interesting discussion. The fact that the top-level URL users go to is not the canonical URL for the page does stray into "breaking the web" territory, at least until it's better supported in browsers. On the other hand, as I understand it that's a technical requirement for AMP to be able to verify the content served through it, which is a requirement in turn for keeping AMP page quality high (in terms of latency, etc, rather than content judgements). Which I think is the most enticing part of AMP, and not something that should be given up lightly. I see AMP as a possible answer to the tragedy-of-the-commons problems that have resulted from standardizing on third party display ads for monetization, third party scripts for analytics, etc. Giving someone else a hook into your page that isn't incentivized to keep it fast and reliable leads to an end state where publishers have no reason to clean up the experience on their own sites because that'd cost them money, and because the bad experience on every other site prevents them from being commensurately rewarded for being a good player. (E.g. adblockers affect every site equally). And the third party tech providers have no incentive to fix things for similar reasons - alternative providers out there would cause the same poor user experiences anyways, and make more money from doing so and enabling them to sell to publishers better. If we cannot rely on principled actions from publishers or tech providers, how does the experience of the web get better enough broadly? AMP to me is an answer to that - maybe not the best answer, but the most viable one I've seen so far. It allows for direct control of what is/isn't possible, and if it gains traction may have enough clout to push for some of those better experiences that aren't arising naturally. The other possible answers I see don't seem to be working better. Relying on regulation seems destined to failure; user experience is too messy to craft rules around, and nobody is placed to enforce them globally. Relying on common gatekeepers seems to be failing - Google algorithm changes worked for a while to incentivize page quality, but I don't think Facebook is (or should?) making equivalent judgements about the quality of content users link to for ranking purposes, and it seems even harder to enforce in other direct-user-sharing sites like Twitter. [Edit] Disclaimer: I work for Google, in Technical Infrastructure. I used to be in Ads, though not related to AMP.