I'm not sure why you think it doesn't make much sense. Google can do things that benefit multiple parties including themselves. I think a lot of this is in rea

I'm not sure why you think it doesn't make much sense. Google can do things that benefit multiple parties including themselves. I think a lot of this is in reaction to FB's Instant Articles and wanting to gain further leverage over publishers. If you can commoditize publishers' content and control the format, and you supply the users and the monetization via ads, you can make the publishers do whatever you want because the alternative is for them to lose money, which they can't afford to do. In many ways, this is a very defensive play by Google. It also happens to provide a better user experience in some ways, which is awesome, and also helps further Google's goals of controlling ad formats and more importantly the data that is collected on publisher sites that lets them monetize their data in ways they may not be able to with AMP pages.