TL;DR:
AMP is Google tech for loading pages quickly on mobile.
Basically AMP is the Google version of Facebook Instant Articles.
Google is pushing this tech as a mean to increase the overall volume of mobile Ad inventory – essentially more page views means more revenues for publishers and Google via DoubleClick.
Solving page load issues can be done without AMP and should be probably done without it.
Google tech selling page for AMP
In short: “AMP provides a great user experience across many platforms” – all the rest is just how to implement it.
Why is it a bad idea?
See Daniel Miessler article :
Google AMP is not a good thing
What was the issue we were trying to solve – and how could we solve this differently ?
Justin Avery make a very good exercice of discussing the AMP sales pitch:
See What is the deal with Accelerated Mobile Pages – AMP
Also :
AMPed up – by Jeremy Keith – british web developper from Brighton:
I love the opening:
“Apple has Apple News. Facebook has Instant Articles. Now Google has AMP: Accelerated Mobile Pages.
The big players sure are going to a lot of effort to reinvent RSS.”
which is – in essence of lot of what is happening.
We used to have a standard way to federate content online – using RSS – and this way keeping up to date with whatever we wanted to – in a very platform-agnostic way – and now with Apple / Google / Facebook fighting for every bits of our attention and money – they are re-creating similar technology to avoid us doing anything outside of their platform.
Last but not least – you can also check Joshua Benton on NiemanLab – makes a good balance of all points:
Get AMP’d: Here’s what publishers need to know about Google’s new plan to speed up your website
Bottom line
It seems a lot of marketing around a simple idea for optimising content : stripping your content from most of its fancy elements – but all the while – avoiding people to leave the Google environment which is the key element for Google.
So, yeah… I am sure from a pure engineering perspective we could have done the same without all the AMP fuss which is basically a way to make more web – real estate for Google to bid on…