Garbage like AMP, or flexing their dominance in the search market to force websites to comply with this or that or risk delisting, is garbage.
Why did they do it? Because news website were heavy, slow, bad experiences compared to Facebook Instant news and Apple News etc. and so they those proprietary options were winning. AMP was designed to allow web sites compete with that.
It was reported that Apple News is taking 50% cut. When media companies keep customers on their own sites they have many options - more are now running their own ad business entirely (NYT most recently). For many reasons I hated to see those proprietary platforms crush the web sites, but the web sites really were too slow and heavy.
I'm certainly not telling you to like AMP - my point is that even their most hated, ham fisted product fits into this mold. It is totally open in every important way (look it up if you don't believe me) and it made a big difference in allowing sites to compete with proprietary platforms.
MS is happy to use/embrace Linux, Chrome (even AMP) etc. but contributing is new to them. The embrace & extinguish thing is not the same when the company is creating and contributing the tech themselves.
They could have prioritized websites with fewer tracking/ads/scripts.
I don't believe that Google cares at all about whats good for the web. They simply want to exploit it and pocket the money (as opposed to re-invest any major portion back in the infra/community) - in that sense, they're no different than any other nameless/faceless corporation.
They are a for profit corporation in the end, so it is unfortunate to depend on them, of course, but I think they need to care about the health of the web - their profits tomorrow depend on it. And I think they've demonstrated it by creating so much tech that they give away.
The downside comes down to the end user experience if those websites being prioritized have lower quality material, which in turn might force those users to use a different search engine that might not care about that if it means they're getting more users.
If they wanted to penalize slow sites they could have… penalized slow sites. There are numerous metrics (paint time, etc) that they can track for that.
Simply prioritising fast, mobile-friendly sites in search results would have achieved that aim.
If there's one thing that's clear from visiting any news publisher's website, it's that news publishers are unable to build sites that are fast and mobile-friendly. But one things news publishers do know how to do is rig up their CMS to also publish to proprietary systems like Facebook Instant Articles.
The magic of AMP was that it tricked publishers into thinking they were publishing to one of those proprietary systems, when in reality they were building a fast mobile website! Because it imposed strict rules rather than just "faster is better", publishers could throw out all of the stupid, awful practices they'd built up around making websites. Can't use that bloated framework of the week, AMP doesn't support it. Can't give the ads department free reign to ship whatever third-party scripts they please, AMP doesn't support it. Don't worry, website team, we're not threatening your jobs -- AMP is just another proprietary reading system, just like Facebook's.
