Which would be ironic, given their whole business has been built on following links and keeping track of what links to what.
More accurately, they want to keep you in their garden. Not knowing it's happening would be advantageous for the goog.
What do they intend to replace them with?
Pretty sure it would still be links behind the scenes. The argument is only for user-facing links to „get simpler“ on the basis of links with tokens and whatnot being to complex and easy to get phished with. Don‘t forget, in Googles vision everyday users won‘t interact with keyboard/mouse or similar in the not too distant future. It‘s all Assistant and device-agnostic ambient computing.
As far as I know they have not proposed a replacement, only an intention to come up with one.
They've proposed the 'portal' element in the last month [0] to replace the link with something... Different... Haven't they?
Portal is moreso an alternative to iframes than an alternative to links. But it's true that it could very well make it more likely for a portal to another site to be included in a page rather than using a link.
They still use a link to source the embedded page as well, it's just that a portal is a bit more friendly with the host frame.
AOL Keywords
Bying ads from Google, only way to get traffic soon.
Wouldn't that just be another type of link?
That's why it's so strange. There isn't an alternative that isn't just a link with a different syntax, so why bother upending the internet for it? Things have worked pretty well for decades now, the whole point of writing a protocol is for long term usage in a changing world. So far so good!
Javascript!
It's the year 2067, all websites are now npm packages. If you want to view a website, you must require it into your browser's package.json.