@pknight I
agree with you 100%.
No corporation should have a monopoly on any aspect of the web.
Should there be a truly corporation/platform-agnostic alternative to AMP? Yes! Definitely. Is that happening right now? Sadly not. It appears to take a "big co" to drive it forward.
I am merely offering the perspective of the publisher who wants their content to be discovered. Google is (still) the "starting point" for many people. Many people have Google as their default search engine and the ubiquity of Google Chrome on both Desktop and Mobile means that is where people enter their "thoughts" when searching for anything ...
If a publisher wants their blog/news/site to be "found", AMP is a really good option because it's "supported" by Google.
Rendering AMP-compliant pages does not mean the publisher cannot have an alternative template/view that is even more "optimised" (i.e. without AMP JS) OR a view with ads from a different network or no ads at all.
I'm not saying AMP a "good" or "bad" thing, just that it's a tool at the disposal of content publishers which can get them better "discoverability" in Google. Which for most people is a major benefit.
Bottom line is: for established publishers who want their content to be "accelerated" on Mobile devices (and thus show up higher in the Google SERPs because Google openly prioritises faster pages/content) and new content producers who want to be "found", AMP is a good way for people who already use Google to discover them.
Further reading for people considering AMP:
https://moz.com/blog/amp-digital-marketing-2018