Can We Stop Big Tech From Controlling the Internet With AI Agents?
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
What does the future of the internet look like? If AI firms get their way, the once-open web could be fractured into digital silos dominated by commercial AI models, leaving hobbyists and small businesses behind. To prevent this, a team of grassroots researchers is planning to fight back and ensure an open approach to AI.
At the heart of this battle is the concept of an AI agent", a piece of software that browses the web and interacts with websites according to the instructions of a human user - for example, planning and booking a holiday. Many people see agents as the next evolution of services like ChatGPT, but getting them to work is proving tricky. That is because the web was built for human use, and developers are realising that AI agents need specialised protocols to better interact with online data, services and each other.
The idea is to build infrastructure so there's a way for software-like bots, which we call AI agents, to communicate with each other," says Catherine Flick at the University of Staffordshire, UK.
Several competing solutions to this problem have already been developed. For example, Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, has developed the Model Context Protocol (MCP), which standardises how AI models connect to different data sources and tools. In April, Google announced its own version of such a concept, the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol.
[...] But because these protocols are coming out of big tech labs, there are concerns that the inventors of the winning protocol could exert their influence to benefit their business, rather than the greater good. MCP requires a central server to oversee connections, while A2A is built around the assumption of a catalogue of approved agents working together, rather than a free-for-all.
We don't want the agent internet' to become another data silo alliance'," says Gaowei Chang. He chairs the AI Agent Protocol Group, which was established in May as part of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards organisation, and says it is essential that all voices are heard in developing this new layer of the internet. If we truly believe AI is an important technology that will change human society, then we need an open, neutral community to drive protocol design, ensuring its future belongs to everyone, not just a few companies," he says.
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