The worst case is that Google is transforming itself from a web search engine to an app store, with AMP "sites" being the apps, and google.com search results being a directory of apps you can "buy" (i.e. read and pay with your attention, instead of cash).
This is certainly not a good direction for "the web", but it's not an illogical path to go down. People seem fine with publishing apps and being beholden to someone's walled garden. Apple does this quite well; people seem to prefer apps to opening a browser and visiting some URL. (As an example of how crazy things have gotten... I wanted to post to Instagram from my computer once, but there is actually no way to do it. You have to transfer your photo to your phone, obtain their app through a walled-garden app store, and THEN upload the photo via the app. What?)
I'll also point out that Google is not really the arbiter of what is and is not the web. Yeah, it's a pretty good search engine. It's the one I open by default. But they have less and less leverage over you every day. In Windows 10, I have a search bar in my taskbar. It does not use Google. I cannot change it to Google. If my interface to the web is a Windows machine, I have to go out of my way to use Google. (I just disabled Cortana completely because I don't use it... but I will still hit the Windows key, type something like "cmd" with the intent to run cmd.exe, typo it, and end up on a Bing page with random search results. Man Google is so evil for doing that to me... wait...)
Whether or not making news articles with ads proprietary (AMP) is good for the world really depends on who you are. If you are writing articles that are funded with ad views, and your readers decide "this loads too slowly, so I've lost interest" or "I know how I can make it faster, install an ad-blocker!", then AMP is great for you. If you are the average HN reader and think "my websites are never slow and ads are evil", then you will think the opposite. Depending on how you look at it, you can easily see working on AMP as changing the world by making independent journalism profitable and easy to read. Or you can see it as throwing away the open web, which is the paragon of all that is right in the world.
Anyway, what I'm saying is that it's not black & white. It's a change, for sure. Some changes are good. Some changes are bad. What you think should dictate whether or not you choose to work on it, because there is no path towards the world being great that everyone agrees on. If there was, we'd all be working on that. Instead, there is disagreement and people have chosen sides. You are on one side, but not everyone agrees with you; hence, there is another side.
What is wrong with considering that there may be something better?
Sure, sometimes they overlap, but Google is past that point lately.
However there is a sliding scale here, and a lot of people will willingly take somewhat lower pay in order to work for places they consider reasonably ethical and transformative.
Pay is not everything, but neither is it nothing.
(My partner works for the Red Cross in the UK, they are a great organisation)
The best HN commenters come here for the opportunity to contribute something far better than that, and we all benefit when they do.
A company that clearly aspires to control the communications system that global society increasingly relies on for everything, that spends massive amounts to influence governments, that controls the visibility and economic destiny of the journalistic organizations that might hold them accountable... could decide to, ya know, do a lot of bad stuff?
For all X, there is a path from X to great harm. Likeliness is critically important in evaluating whether X is still a good thing or not. I grant that your scenario is possible, but I consider it very unlikely.
Wasn't that the entire premise of embrace, extend, extinguish? Sure, adopting open source technology is good, but it seems to me that Google's in the "extend" phase rather than being actually altruistic.
Android is not entirely open-source. Chrome browser is not entirely open-source. Google Web Apps are not open source. Google Search is not open source.