«the entire AMP approach to doing this is questionable»
Why? AMP is roughly speaking a subset of HTML that's somewhat easier to cache, and nothing more. Ideally it should be possible and encouraged to serve most webpages from a cache, to optimize Internet traffic on the global scale. It should be okay to fetch them from a cache without breaking anything. I don't see why the AMP Cache is hated so much. Publishers shouldn't care whether browsers hit their servers or some third-party cache, as long as they can have proper analytics. And guess what? AMP does provide a way to do proper analytics. You can even send analytics data to an in-house URL: https://amp.dev/documentation/components/amp-analytics/#send... I think most of the hate against AMP in unjustified. Any search engine could decide to cache AMP content.[1] AMP in and of itself doesn't give search engines "more control" over the web (whatever that means), it just makes the web easier to cache for everyone, all search engines, all end-users.
> What's in a URL? On the web, a lot - URLs and origins represent, to some extent, trust and ownership of content. When you're reading a New York Times article, a quick glimpse at the URL gives you a level of trust that what you're reading represents the voice of the New York Times. Attribution, brand, and ownership are clear.
> the recent launch of AMP in Google Search [has] blurred this line
Google has inserted itself in the URL. Copy and paste that, submit it to reddit or Hacker News, or just read it to a friend, and what do you get? A connection to Google.
But anybody (Bing, Yahoo, etc) can "insert themselves in the URL" if they decide to cache the AMP content. In fact they could also cache non-AMP pages if they wanted. This isn't a problem created by AMP in and of itself.
You can't even make the argument that AMP degrades privacy, because regardless of whether you click an AMP link or a non-AMP link in the search results, in both cases many search engines will ping back or use a redirect through a search engine-controlled domain, so they will be aware of the URL you click anyway, AMP or non-AMP.
Anyone else who inserts themselves in the URL should be fought as well.
I guess you're making a minor technical point, and it's technically correct. Someone else could do AMP better. But until someone does, why not shorten "Google's implementation of AMP" to simply "AMP"? Is there any other?
I agree that there is a UX problem to solve (the address bar should show the original URL, copying it should preserve the original URL, etc) but whether the webpage got loaded from the original site or from some AMP cache is irrelevant.
Why do you care? You like the address bar to show the original domain name? What if this UX problem was solved by the address bar always showing the original URL, regardless of whether the content was loaded from an AMP cache or not?
I care because I want to know what server I'm hitting up. There are many servers that I don't want to be touching, regardless of whether the bits being delivered are correct or not. If the URL bar is lying to me, then I can't detect if I'm talking to a server I don't want to be talking to.
I also want to avoid AMP pages themselves, and the URL is the easiest way to see if I've hit one or not.
Why? AMP is roughly speaking a subset of HTML that's somewhat easier to cache, and nothing more. Ideally it should be possible and encouraged to serve most webpages from a cache, to optimize Internet traffic on the global scale. It should be okay to fetch them from a cache without breaking anything. I don't see why the AMP Cache is hated so much. Publishers shouldn't care whether browsers hit their servers or some third-party cache, as long as they can have proper analytics. And guess what? AMP does provide a way to do proper analytics. You can even send analytics data to an in-house URL: https://amp.dev/documentation/components/amp-analytics/#send... I think most of the hate against AMP in unjustified. Any search engine could decide to cache AMP content.[1] AMP in and of itself doesn't give search engines "more control" over the web (whatever that means), it just makes the web easier to cache for everyone, all search engines, all end-users.
Edit: [1] not only Google caches it, Bing does it too: https://blogs.bing.com/Webmaster-Blog/September-2018/Introdu...