Source: Search Engine Journal
The proliferation of competing technical standards—Model Context Protocol, Agent-to-Agent communication, Natural Language Web, and Agents.md—reflects an infrastructure moment where no single vendor has locked in dominance over how AI systems will interoperate and delegate tasks. Unlike previous platform wars fought over closed ecosystems, these standards battles are being conducted in the open because economic value accrues to whoever controls the interoperability layer itself, not the endpoints. Whichever protocol stack wins determines whether AI agents become modular, composable tools that shift power to end-users, or proprietary black boxes that concentrate control among a handful of model providers.