[tyingq]

These have been changed, but at different times...

- It was required to show up in the carousel

- It injected a banner at the top of your content that pushed your content down. The banner featured an "[X]" button that seemed like it might dismiss it, but it sent you back to Google instead

- The real url was deliberately hidden, and initially not even an actual link, but just text.

- It hijacked swipe events to navigate to competitor pages, and hijacked the back button in certain cases also

And, the AMP spec still requires loading a piece of google controlled javascript onto your page...that does whatever it wants.

What's not to hate? At one time, it was basically a protection racket. "Use this objectionable thing, or your organic traffic will drop".

[notahacker]

Plus in practice, adverse selection involving the sort of websites that actually bothered with AMP; basically everyone who created pages purely for Google juice to drive their profits rushed to create AMP pages whereas much-loved evergreen content generally wasn't available in that format (unless spitting out AMP pages was baked into updates to their CMS platform) and was of course pushed further down the page with the organic search results as a result.