> Browser specs can be improved, and new ones introduced.
Yes, for example Signed Exchanges, which on a technical level solves all of the problems of rel=prefetch (and a number of the problems with AMP, like link pasting and copying).
> Should we allow a handful of companies to be pinged every time we load a page on the web
I'm hopelessly confused here: you're only going to "ping" one of the handful of companies if you were referred by that company. (In a world with signed exchanges) You're not going to come across an AMP-cache link organically. You'll navigate to example.com directly, without anyone except example.com (and your DNS provider) knowing. The cache provider will only know if you navigate to the cached site via the cache provider. Concretely, you don't go to the Google amp-cache unless you're navigating there directly from Google's search results. Same for Microsoft/Bing.
So if your metric is
> Should we allow a handful of companies to be pinged every time we load a page on the web
Then yes, absolutely, because nothing changes!
Edit: To address your other question,
> should we give Google and a handful of other companies disproportionate control over how we publish and consume content, for 50ms of load time?
Alright: how is AMP materially different from <whatever other algorithmic choices rated search results before>?
You seem to be claiming that AMP is harmful to someone but who? It's not harmful to competitors or to end users, and its only harmful to developers if you make the most strained argument.
My premises here are that users actually prefer AMP results. You may not, but my understanding is that most users do. So from the perspective of an end user browsing the internet, AMP leads to an improved experience.
So it's good for users.
No one has yet been able to explain to me how its actually harmful to a web developer who now has an incentive to make AMP-compatible sites. Like sure, you now have to work with a framework you may not like, but that's not a compelling argument when people are claiming that AMP is a threat to the sanctity of the internet.
So it's not like bad for web developers, it's just sort of a lateral move.
That leaves competitors to the giants. But AMP is an open standard, and DDG could, if they wished, implement an AMP cache themselves today and it would just work. And they'd, if anything, benefit from the bigger players pushing that ecosystem. There's the potential for abuse via the caches.json registry, but the AMP project is aware of this and notes that the registry could be decentralized using Subresource Integrity or similar, if such a standard was adopted[1].
So again: I'm confused by how exactly it's bad, beyond the "I am forced to develop in a way I don't want to if I want to appear near the top of the search page", which isn't new.
[1]: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/pull/18495/commits/c5d...