TCP/IP took nine years to deploy. MCP moved to the Linux Foundation in one. That contrast explains everything about how protocol development has changed.
I've been tracking the explosion of AI Agent protocols over the last 18 months. The contrast with history is staggering:
- TCP/IP: 9 years from paper to "Flag Day."
- OAuth 2.1: 5+ years and still counting.
- Model Context Protocol (MCP): <1 year from launch to Linux Foundation.
It’s not just MCP. In 2025 alone, we saw:
- Google's Agent2Agent (50+ partners),
- Universal Commerce Protocol (20+ retailers)
- AP2 (Payments) all ship.
- Agent Protocol, UTCP and few more.
We are entering an era of "Room Consensus": where a few giants agree on a spec and ship it to billions, bypassing the slow deliberation of the RFC era.
Is this efficiency? Or fragility?
I break down the landscape of the new agent protocols and what this means for developers in my latest post.
