>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.
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 now moving to scoring sites based on their speed, but any big change they make to their search algorithm is done very slowly and with tons of advance warning - AMP was something of a quick stop gap.
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.
> They could have prioritized websites with fewer tracking/ads/scripts.
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.
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.