Just starting to learn about Google AMP. The idea seems to be to encourage good website design:

AMP, which will display pages four times faster, according to Google, has launched because interactive features became too burdensome across widely travelled websites. Too many ads, too many slideshows, too much dynamically embedded content without much value to the user...

The lite-loading HTML creates a preferred language across content manufacturers. No more poorly formatted local news sites, purposely-scaled and vaguely branded content farms...

Social networks and search engines want to deliver content to users without losing them, bouncing around pages without gimmicky Outbrain related links that lead you straight to nowhere. AMP pages help Google browsers feel like they aren't just being propelled into a web of nothingness.

I'm 100% on board with that. The downside seems to be that Google is making AMP available to "premium content farms" before everyone else, creating a two-tiered system of websites: "big box" sites that get top priority in search results and then sites by random people (like this one and a lot of the sites i read). The issue there ultimately stems from the fact that Google has (deservedly) won the search engine game and is effectively a monopoly, so the way that they prioritize their search results has a huge impact.