I can make pages faster without AMP by stripping the needless bloat and using a proper CDN. Why do I need this tech again, besides the artificial goad of page rank?
You can. In theory. But people don't, as is evident with the web we have today. So Google comes along and tries to force people to do it. AMP wouldn't exist if people would've optimized their webpages on their own.
(That being said, I dislike it as a content provider and as someone worried Google has too much power)
Plus who needs to lose even more screen space to that stupid bar at the top plus the fact that the browser chrome doesn't hide itself when you scroll like it does on a normal page?
In the long run, it might be bad for users, as it could result in media producing less valuable content, and one big company having more control over distribution.
But yeah, nothing's free. They give you this great technology, free access to their world-wide CDN, and better organic search results, at the cost of having the X button going back to search.
Though I have no idea how the author things that the "X" button should go back to the home page honestly... You open an article, you close the article. If you want to go to the homepage, you click the top banner with the logo.
He's not suggesting the "X" leads to the home[0] page, but to the actual "deeplink" page (blogpost, etc).
I'm not the author, but here's my idea:
Normal webpage: click result in Google, page loads (for a long time), I click reader view, read some, close reader view, explore the site.
AMP page: allows me to skip the loading time & the click on 'reader view' and start reading directly (so far, so good), but then I close "(AMP) reader view" and want to explore the site. Instead I am back at square one, exactly where Google wants me to be.
Their success becomes ever more tied to Google for the next hit.
And again, definitely not by pressing X. Pressing X means you're done with the article. And if you're interested, you'd press the websites logo at the top to go home, not X.
Then Facebook started to court publishers and suddenly the best way to read a lot of web content was inside of Facebook which is obviously terrible for Google. So Google came up with Amp as a way for publishers to provide the same experience on the web.
Yep, and that something was that it was an initiative by Google.
They are not a charity. They would not do this is it didn't benefit them (or inconvenience a competitor, though Google seem to err on the side of the former rather then aggressively going for the latter) in some way. The fact that is offers benefits for others is secondary, or at best has equal footing in their collective mind (many individuals within the company may be more altruistic individually, but the company as a single entity won't be).