What does AMP have to do with anything? The fine article is about flagging potential URL homograph attacks. It's a reasonable thing for a browser to do, since those attacks are incredibly hard to spot.
I don't know why Wired clickbaited the headline like this.
They've been running wild with "KILLING THE URL" for some time now. Put it right next to "Google murdering ad blockers" and "Google decapitating hangouts classic".
Is there any unbiased article out there going over the proposals?
And the relevance is that AMP shows its own fake-URL bar, and Google could choose to "kill the URL" by trusting https://www.google.com/amp/ with not-URL overrides. (But, they could do that presently and trust themselves with URL overrides.)
The reasonable thing would be to display the real domain, and the punycode one, in the same bar. Then you can at least detect some homograph attacks. Or possible use a monospace font for the URL bar. So that 0 with a dash and O are actually visible at first glance.
Please distinguish between fonts-for-data and monospace-fonts.
E.g. http://input.fontbureau.com/info/#writing has a sample of a not-actually-monospace font with IMHO awesome legibility in the mentioned "matter-of-fact" category of typefaces.
0 with a dash and O without are not at all bound to monospaced fonts.
FYI, I left console editors due to their inability to handle my preferred Input Sans Narrow Light 14pt (16pt on my 110 dpi screen), just so you can understand the pain of monospace.
I don't know why Wired clickbaited the headline like this.