The Agent Space Is About to Have Its TCP/IP Moment. Here Is What That Means for Builders.

Short summary

Multi-agent systems currently solve transport problems at the application layer—service discovery, NAT traversal, authentication—forcing each team to duplicate infrastructure work. An open, standardized agent transport protocol would move these concerns to a dedicated layer, freeing builders to focus on use-case logic. Pilot Protocol, A2A, and MCP are emerging contenders for this standardization, similar to TCP/IP's role in networking.

• •Today's agents duplicate transport-layer work (discovery, NAT, auth) at application level across teams.
• •A standardized protocol layer like TCP/IP for networking would consolidate these problems into infrastructure.
• •Emerging candidates include Pilot Protocol, A2A (Google/Linux Foundation), and MCP—the question is standardization speed.

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