Ah yes, after web designers and developers took years upon years to bloat webpages to the point they're almost unusable unless you're on a privileged position: inaccessible to the blind, infuriatingly slow to those with slow connections and laden with so much JavaScript and CSS and images, they're impractical to those with a laptop or any battery-powered device... now they band together against the evils of Google.
Now, don't get me wrong, Google is thinking primarily for their own benefit here and this is one of those cases in which the end doesn't justify the means, but is a simpler web that much of a bad thing?
This morning when I was reading the thread about how Google wants to kill the URL, nobody was seeing the more sinister implications at all.
I couldn't pay a parking ticket I got a few days ago because I needed to download a half gigabye app to pay it, and my $250 phone from three years ago wasn't new enough. And they developed the app first, and there was no fallback to just HTML. My only choice was to go to the station and pay. What if I couldn't afford to travel to pay my ticket in person and couldn't afford a phone made in the last 18 months?
And yes, certificates will be politicized. If you displease them, they can have every device in the world block your server.
Of course, soon, Firefox will just be a re-branded Chromium, because of course Mozilla's brand is the only asset it has, as we all know that if Mozilla can't make Firefox keep up with the impossible standards that Google sets for us, then it is worthless. If Firefox can't implement the latest polyfills or DRM garbage that Google decided on, then it should be thrown out and we should just accept our new overlords.
Use any technology in a non-standard way, and it quickly becomes clear how bad things are. The rot is even more visible in developing countries.
Simpler doesn't necessarily have to mean AMP, though. If Google really wanted to improve performance, they could just create some simple requirements - "if you want to appear at the top of the search results, your page can't take more than X seconds to load, use more than XXX kb of data", etc, and show warnings in the search console to websites that don't comply. The only reason to create AMP is to increase Google's control over websites so they can make more money selling ads.
Now, don't get me wrong, Google is thinking primarily for their own benefit here and this is one of those cases in which the end doesn't justify the means, but is a simpler web that much of a bad thing?