Agents are not search engines.
For thirty years, the web shaped itself around a query box and a list of blue links. Agents inherit none of that grammar. An agent that finds a product but cannot quote it, lock it, or pay for it is a glorified search engine — and the friction it pushes back to the user is precisely the friction the agent was meant to remove.
Per-merchant integration is a tax on the future.
A world where every agent must hand-integrate with every merchant is a world where two or three players control all of agentic commerce — because only they can afford the integration tax. Open protocols turn N×M into N+M. That is not a technical preference. That is the difference between a network and a moat.
Eight verbs is enough.
discover, search, get, quote, checkout, status, cancel, return. Across five item types — product, stay, flight, bus, service — these eight verbs cover the full lifecycle of any commercial transaction we have observed. The protocol stays small on purpose. Surface area is liability.
Signed quotes, not screen-scrapes.
Every quote is HMAC-signed and time-bounded. Every checkout exchanges a quote for an order with auditable state. Trust is a property of the wire format, not of the operator running the registry. A protocol that depends on goodwill cannot be neutral.
Neutrality is a covenant, not a marketing claim.
The registry must remain operator-neutral. Listings must not be ranked by who pays, who's friends with the operator, or who shipped first. Conformance — measurable, signed, time-bounded — is the only ranking signal allowed. Read the neutrality charter.
MIT, not BSL.
The spec, the SDK, the conformance harness, the reference agents, the registry implementation — all MIT-licensed. Forks should be encouraged, not punished. A protocol's strength is the diversity of implementations that speak it.
Protocols win when they are shorter than the README of any single implementation. We will keep this one shorter than that.