That might be a more believable explanation of why they did it if they weren't hijacking the content and hosting it on their own domain with left-right swipes that take users off of your site. Users don't actually visit your site, but they visit a restricted shell of it on google.com.

I'm not a fan of AMP either; just wanted to point out that it's unfair to say Google should have encouraged better practises when they did just that.

(Not that I'm a fan of Google/any single company having to be that warden, but I digress.)

Except there's NOTHING technically requiring google to serve AMP from their own domain. None of the speed benefits can justify that. AMP could just be another standard where the basic lib is preloaded on the browser.

If you want to pre-load the page in the background in search results without allowing the site operator to track the user, they do need to serve it from somewhere they control.

You could just have an AMP doctype supported natively by Chrome (and whoever wants it) which does the same. Google just did not went that route.

They did announce that they still want to go that route, somewhat: https://amphtml.wordpress.com/2018/03/08/standardizing-lesso...

The destination server would still get a request on preload if there is no proxy operated by Google, no matter how you enforced the standard.

Yes, that's fine by me.