Earlier quoted context omitted.
> AMP does NOT outperform HTML5 unless the HTML5 page is horribly designed and ridiculously bloated. But that can be fixed without Google's help. And yet, noone cared enough to fix it until now. It's really really hard to sympathize with publishers when they brought this upon themselves by turning their pages into giant autoplaying video infested places.
If that's all Google truly cared about they could've simply put a heavy penalty on Pages that rendered slow or presented garbage. Instead they invented their own thing which caused you to stay on Google sites using Google services to read other peoples content… and said they did it to speed things up. It feels like that was either justification after the fact or that was with the original engineer had in mind but was…
There already is a penalty for slow-loading pages, but you make a good point that the penalty could be increased to the point where publishers would be forced to adapt accordingly. However, outside of the news ecosystem, that would end up penalizing a much larger base of content creators who don't have the means and infrastructure to handle this.
To say that "well users who have good content should also get their shit together" rings a bit hollow, especially on HN, where technical/deep/interesting articles get upvoted to the front page only to crash from the traffic. If authors of those articles/sites can't do it, then it's a problem for most folks.