A Google employee commented above about the design reasoning behind this, and it's worth reading and understanding the linked GitHub discussion:

> It looks to me like the design for this was https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/3133

To be clear, I'm not defending Google here, but I just want to point out that it's possible to be "evil" (for whatever that means) without being malicious. That is, I don't think any Google engineer was thinking "Haha! We'll slow down all those non-AMP ads deliberately!" The thinking seems to have been "We want to be somewhat 'backwards compatible' to allow non-AMP ads, but we don't want those ads to kill AMP's performance benefits, so we'll still load them but only after the AMP content has loaded and rendered."

However, this is exactly the mindset that I hate about AMP, and it drives me a little nuts when I see Googlers defending it. I get that your intentions are good, but don't you realize that it's not an accident that the primary beneficiary of AMP is Google, e.g. by keeping users in the SERP instead of going off to sites where the content is hosted, and by making everything ideal for the ad network you own? Googlers have to come to realize that essentially all of their engineering decisions are constrained by what makes more money for Google, not what is best for users. Sure, faster page loads are great, but do you honestly think Google would have supported a tech that made page loads faster ig it didn't cause people to look at more Google ads? I mean, if Google really supported what was best for users, they'd support more privacy controls a la what is coming in iOS Safari, but of course they don't because that's bad for their business.

I hate AMP and hope it dies, but I don't hate it because I think there aren't some user benefits to it, I hate it because it is a further attempt by a single company to own even more of the Internet.

>We want to be somewhat 'backwards compatible' to allow non-AMP ads

It requires some pretty absurd mental calisthenics to be able to see AMP as an upgrade on the open web.

Can you elaborate? The argument is that AMP is part of the open web, that it’s an open standard everyone can use and lots of people do use. That doesn’t exonerate Google for (allegedly) using anticompetitive practices to push and shape the standard, but I can’t see a critique of AMP as a project that wouldn’t apply equally well to WHATWG’s management of HTML. I think this is something where a lot of people just don’t know how the sausage is made.

The fact that google runs a cache is part of AMP, and open for criticism.

The fact that google does not let you disable AMP from your browsing experience is part of AMP, and open for criticism.

The fact that google will prefer AMP over non-AMP links even if this means looking for a newly launch site with dynamic content (that can't be amp'ed) will get buried by articles about that site because they have AMP, is part of AMP, and open for criticism.

ie: AMP the """standard""" may be good, but everything google did with AMP is fucking horrible, and utterly and irreparably stains AMP, if only for enabling these things.

And the fact that google benefits from AMP, AND also started AMP and shaped AMP, just kinda nails the argument that you can't seperate out AMP from how google uses AMP.

Im referring to AMP the caching service run by Google. That is very much a walled garden.

If they turned it off tomorrow the standard would still exist.

FWIW, I had something of an impression that Google AMP was kind of a hacky attempt to "fight back" against Facebook Instant Articles, which made browsing random news on Facebook "more fun" and faster (etc.) than using the web (and particularly Google).

It was. It is now retroactively justified as "a way to speed up web" or somesuch.

It never was more than a way to grab traffic, market and money share.