[cromwellian]

Before AMP was introduced, News was increasingly being siloed on Apple News and FB Instant Articles. The story was going to end with Apple News/FaceBook sucking up all of the publishers. The publishers could theoretically have all fixed it themselves, but they weren't, and increasingly native news apps were winning over the web.

AMP was a collaboration with publishers to keep content on the Web. It's an open source project, and is implemented not only by Google, but by Bing, Baidu, even CloudFlare has an implementation. Google successfully organized the publishers and got them to fix the problems that many people claim they would have fixed by just doing it themselves, but that wasn't happening, user experience was becoming horrible, and rather than fix their sites, they were basically giving in to Instant Articles. AMP kept news on the web instead of in the App Store.

AMP is supported by most major browsers, requires no proprietary browser extensions, is just HTML, implemented by multiple search engines and CDNs, and is an open spec and source project. I'm not really sure why so many people are losing their shit over it. It's based on standard web technologies. I understand the UI issues, but those look like they're getting fixed.