Calling AMP pages "instant" loads is disingenuous because Google preloads them before they are opened. Google is free to do this for my website too, but they don't.
> Google is free to do this for my website too, but they don't.
As my GGGGGP post said, that is the entire point of AMP. It can be validated safe to preload, which is not possible for HTML pages in general. So no, Google, Bing, Pinterest, Baidu, LinkedIn, and other sites that preload AMP pages are not free to do this for your website unless it is written in AMP.
> It can be validated safe to preload, which is not possible for HTML pages in general.
What does this even mean? My browser already preloads websites in the background, AMP or not. So assuming I don't go through Google, you could call going to my website via the address bar "instant" as well.
> User isn't deanonymized to the publisher, publisher analytics and ads don't register page views, page can be trivially transformed to lazy load below the fold, etc.
This is all explained in the AMP documentation itself. There was even an article about it on HN not too long ago (https://medium.com/@pbakaus/why-amp-caches-exist-cd7938da245...). People like the author who criticize AMP without knowing what problem it solves are willfully ignorant.
This all works on the open web without signing an agreement with the traffic source, unlike Facebook's and Apple's proprietary instant article solutions. That's why it has been adopted by so many other search engines and link aggregators.
Don't shove JavaScript and random bloat into your website? That's what I do.