Much of SPDY was integrated into HTTP/2. Much of Typescript has made its way into ECMAScript n+1. Large companies often need to prove the value in new web technology before the community is willing to standardize it. I wouldn't be surprised to see AMP become a standard in the not so distant future.

With AMP, Google doesn't only define the standard - a core point of AMP is that AMP carefully controls which scripts run on the page.

The whole standard is designed so that you cannot insert any custom script with access to the page DOM: the closest you can do is insert cross-domain iframes, and even those have weird restrictions (like they must be outside the part of the page that the user can likely see without scrolling)

On the one hand, this trivially solves many of the "obesity" problems as the AMP team can make sure every single allowed script fits their performance requirements. On the other hand, this requires contous engagement by the AMP team, something which would have very questionable implications if AMP would become a web standard.

Yes and no. The AMP project is by Google, but several of the big companies are playing in this space. Eventually they don't mind if some of the practices become W3C standards and the project is somewhat open being on GitHub for people to contribute to

Google has AMP Facebook has Instant Articles Apple has the Apple News Format

So AMP is Google's version, which is really stripped down HTML to make a page load faster. (Minimize requests, don't block things, etc)

The whole project is open and on GitHub. The easiest example I know off the top of my head is to replace www with amp on Guardian pages. For example https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/22/canada-childre... shows how an article differs slightly than its non-AMPed version

//TODO: Abstract this out so its shared with the main GA tracking

AMP is just a methodology which encourages a restricted subset of HTML, CSS, and JS implementation. They've chosen to implemented because the specific subset they've chosen to support eschews particularly slow-to-load features. Yes, it's Google's methodology, and yes they are planning on pushing it by highlighting AMP sites in search results - however, it's not really doing anything special code-wise besides enforcing said methodology.

Easy just use HTML/CSS and pages will load and render fast, no need to create stuff like AMP.

You may be even more surprised to hear that some people consider the web essentially Google's platform.

And in some countries, Facebook and "the Internet" are essentially synonyms.

Amongst my grandparents and their friends, AOL = Internet.

AMP is nothing. Businesses hire tons of people just to optimize their site specifically for google. AMP is a tiny part of what SEO-ers do. Everyone uses Google so they dictate a lot about how websites must function/act/exist.

In other words, their monopoly or semi-monopoly means every action from them has severe effects on other markets, and them displaying any of their products before actual search results kills the competitors.

In other words, you’re saying Google has powers that only governments should have.