Webcomponents exist as a loose set of standards that are marginally cross-browser, but Google has the biggest/most popular framework using web components.
They even deprecated Chrome Apps in favor of the PWA standard. Google has nothing to gain from hurting the open web ecosystem.
They've basically ensured that another Netscape/Chrome cannot happen, they've pushed the complexity of the web so quickly that only the biggest most well funded companies can afford to keep up.
I really want to believe this. But how does AMP fit into this? I feel it is quite counter to the idea of an open web. Please do not take this as an attack or criticism, I would like to, in fact, learn some better arguments in favour of why Google would support, rather than suppress an open web ecosystem.
To be clear, I'm not saying that it is necessarily representative of reality, but that's the idea.
Walled gardens like Apple News and Facebook Instant actually run counter to this open web. They can't be publicly indexed or crawled or searched, yet they have the valuable advantage of being really fast. I see AMP as an aggressive optimization designed to bring web performance up to par with native platforms like Apple News and Facebook Instant. When a publisher chooses AMP instead of exclusively using those closed platforms, it's a win for the open web when their content uses web standards (AMP is merely a strict subset of web standards) accessible by anyone, not just Apple or Facebook users.
I think nowadays "the open web ecosystem" has come to mean something different in discussions like this, closer in meaning to "the distributed web" or "a less corporate web". Google obviously doesn't care for that.
Internet Explorer was terrible because they would drop some binary blob (ActiveX, Flash Player) into the interpreter. And those binaries were neither standardised, nor cross-platform, nor OSS.
None of that is true for Chrome. Google's additions tend be useful, which is why "too fast" and "bloated" is the only (generic and subjective) criticism people can come up with. With Safari on Mac and especially iOS, Google also doesn't quite own the same position that MS did. Nor do they have any incentives to harm other browsers: their competitors are Facebook and iOS native apps, i. e. the walled gardens that can't be crawled and searched.
In some ways, it's for the best that Microsoft basically stopped development in the days of IE6, as it didn't lead to the exponential feature bloat that has been the case the last few years.