Amp is supposed to reduce file size and script overhead. Its seemingly innocent goal was to speed up page loading on slower mobile devices and reduce bandwidth usage. Google then cached entire amp versions of articles on their servers and never load the original when searchers or Google news app users click to read an article. It means the authors of the articles web pages never get hit by readers. This is I think the main reason why website owners are quite upset.
You're only half right. While Amp is designed to create small pages, what's more important is that they should be safely-embeddable. That means there's no potentially unsafe scripts or asset requests. That why Amp uses a subset of HTML as defined via WebComponents.
>Google then cached entire amp versions of articles on their servers
That's the Amp Cache. The cache allows vendors like Google, Microsoft, and Cloudflare (who each run their own caches) to automatically preload these pages in search results without there being any risk to the user. Yes, Bing runs a copy too.
"preloading" the entire article the way say, Google News app does for example means that without going two touches deeper it essentially negates the user ever needing to visit the site that originally authored the content removing them entirely from the process. It's not very content-creator friendly. For that matter, why use the internet if you don't trust anyone but Google, Microsoft, Cloudflare, etc? Insanity. The internet may as well be considered broken and useless if you can't trust your web browser to at least minimally protect you from scripts automatically hijacking your computer with an "unsafe script".
Also, I did mention scripts but left it short and sweet with the limited support of scripting that AMP has to explain AMP in more simple terms.
> ... it essentially negates the user ever needing to visit the site that originally authored the content removing them entirely from the process.
Yes, in this sense they are acting as a CDN. The original website is still authoring the content however.
> The internet may as well be considered broken and useless if you can't trust your web browser to at least minimally protect you from scripts automatically hijacking your computer with an "unsafe script".
It's not just about malware. I'm sure most users would not be comfortable with websites being able to track them after simply performing search results. Actually going to a website is an action with more intent behind it.
It's supposedly a component framework. supposedly you can build web stuff faster and easier using it. In reality it looks like Google is using it a Trojan horse
I searched 'google amp', and I can't really understand what it's supposed to do?
Can anyone explain what problem AMP is supposed solve, or what features it brings to the table?