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Google mobile Search’s Top Stories carousel has a premium position above of all other results, which is only accessible for AMP pages. These pages have to use a technology that was build and maintained mostly by Google (of the top 10 contributors to the AMP project on GitHub, 9 are Google employees), are then served by Google from their infrastructure and placed within a Google controlled user experience. And since this carousel generates a lot of clicks and revenue, publishers are left no choice but to embrace AMP. This has the effect of further reinforcing Google’s dominance of the Web. Fortunately, Google has announced that it's working on opening up the Top Stories carousel to non-AMP pages in 2021.
When a user navigates from Google to a piece of content Google has recommended (or when a user clicks on a shared cached AMP link), they are, unwittingly, remaining within Google’s ecosystem and the publisher’s domain is obscured by the google.com/amp prefix. To work around this Google introduced Signed HTTP Exchanges ([Draft], [1], [2]), a web-standard that allows the browser to display the original site's URL, instead of the actual one (the one with the google.com/prefix). This would solve the original issue, but while doing so it introduced new ones (e.g. it obfuscates the fact that they're delivering the AMP page you're visiting). Interestingly enough, Google's Chrome already has support for this technology, but parties not involved with AMP are not so enthusiastic: Mozilla has deemed it a harmful web standard [2], and Apple has taken a similar stance.