1. Users have no control: if you want real URLs or the full experience, you have to work around AMP or stop using Google.
2. It's technically true that publishers can choose whether to use AMP but Google rank is a make-or-break issue for many publishers and that means the decisions is made under the threat of losing out to competitors who use AMP even if your site is already just as fast using non-proprietary tooling.
It would be much better for the open web and innovation in general if Google maintained a separation between the two and only used the real user experience when deciding ranking or placement in the special top results carousel.
1. Correct, I mean opt-in from the publishers, who seem to be the exclusive people complaining
2. Yes. As a user who really enjoys amp and really hates that every single text-based news source takes over a minute to load on a 100Mb/s+ connection, I feel not bad at all. Not even the tiniest bit. Publishers entirely brought this upon themselves. Internet speeds are faster than they've ever been, and websites are the slowest they have ever been. This is fundamentally unacceptable.
It would be better for users, and by extension, the web, if publishers stopped building horrendously bloated websites. Since they absolutely positively refuse to, AMP seems the appropriate answer - if there's demand to take away their toys, someone is going to feed into it eventually.
I'm a user. I hate AMP as a user. If it didn't have terrible scrolling and weird navigation behavior and hide the information source, then I'd probably like it for the speed. And since I don't mind other walled gardens like the iOS App Store, I probably wouldn't mind AMP. But I hate it so much that I switched search engines, since I couldn't turn AMP off when using Google search.
I sometimes discuss principled reasons for disliking AMP in HN threads, but I'm coming to the realization that it's really just the experience i dislike, and those principles would probably be overridden by UX convenience, if it actually existed. I just think the AMP team has done a really bad job of implementation now.
I find AMP only a marginal improvement over using an ad blocker. I see a far more noticeable speed boost leaving JavaScript disabled by default — that quick per-domain toggle is 80% of why I use Brave on iOS.
>>1. Correct, I mean opt-in from the publishers, who seem to be the exclusive people complaining
There are all kinds of complaints on this very page about how AMP negatively alters the user experience (stupid urls, broken scrolling, bar covering 1/3 of the content, broken UI, inability to turn it off, etc).
Those don't sound to me like "exclusive" publisher complaints.
Full stop. You choose to participate in AMP. You can't choose to not be throttled by an ISP, or to bypass censorship.