I wonder why they don't just prioritize the ~500 most popular of those content providers that are feeding them sludge articles, and write (AI-generate, even) logic to manually parse and transform said sludge into their format?

It'd be a big one-time lift; and of course there'd be annoying constant breakage to fix as sites update; but News.app could always fall back to rendering the original article URL if the News backend service's currently-deployed parser-transformer for a given site failed on the given article. It's make things no worse and often better than they are today.

I can't imagine it's a great deal for publishers. It's probably why NYT, Economist and other prestige publications aren't on it. (Save for Atlantic, New Yorker). I. Assuming they use the Spotify model ( paying commissions on articles per reader)?

The 10000ft perspective on AMP was correct, the lived reality was awful. And the technical implementation used can't be divorced from everything that surrounded it: Google's place in the industry with regard to search engines, ads, etc.

In this specific example there is a very big difference between producing a format for use in a first-party app vs trying to replace standards for content used across the web.

AMP was a good technical solution for a short window of time, deliberately tanked by confusing/centralized stewardship.

They kept opening it more and more but by then it was too late.