Google has an eye on the next billion web users---the ones who aren't on the network yet because of cost and bandwidth. Their experience will be significantly bandwidth-constrained in the short run, and AMP is one of the initiatives to provide a segment of the web that works in such an ecosystem.

If the web were going in a direction to serve that demographic organically, AMP wouldn't be necessary.

That's an interesting point, especially since Facebook's strategy for those same billion users is to bring bandwidth (which happens to be preferentially dedicated to Facebook properties) to them.

But it's actively making the Internet worse for the current users. Is it worth destroying the current user base in order to attract a new one?

How is it making the Internet worse for current users?

Well do you really like the idea that when you go to some search result it effectively is opening an iframe to the website you're trying to go?

Or as a web developer you need to make sure to adopt to their stupid standards like renaming your img to amp-img and making sure it works in amp and non-amp so you'd be doing both?

I see it as complete bollocks.

> Do you really like the idea that when you go to some search result it effectively is opening an iframe to the website you're trying to go?

As an end-user or web developer?

As an end-user, I do not care. In fact, it seems that the AMP solution (which isn't an iframe so much as just serving the data from Google's cache at a Google URL) is faster.

> Or as a web developer you need to make sure to adopt to their stupid standards like renaming your img to amp-img and making sure it works in amp and non-amp so you'd be doing both?

As a developer, if I care enough about my user's experience to be bothering with AMP in the first place, I should be using a toolchain that makes it pretty straightforward to go from my meta-representation of my content to the render target (HTML / css, etc.). Because that toolchain should already be doing things like precompiling my CSS, condensing my image data, etc.

Ah yes, let's continue down the path of bloated web sites loading MB's of JavaScript. If you don't like it then just simply switch to a search engine that doesn't support it.

It makes really long and ugly URLs too.

Fortunately there's only one site I read regularly that uses AMP - Google News