These protocols are to put handlers between you and your own data so they can sell it back to you via “search.”
Companies who are betting their future on LLMs realized a few years ago that the data they can legally use is the only long term difference between them, aka “moat.”
Now that everyone has more or less the same public data access, and a thin compute moat is still there, the goal is to transfer your private textual data to them forever so they have an ever updating and tuned set of models for your data
Who is "they" (or "them") in these sentences? It's an open protocol with 50 partner companies, which can be used with AI agents from ~anyone on ~any framework. Presumably you can use this protocol in an air-gapped network, if you'd like.
Which one of the 50 partner companies is taking my data and building the moat? Why would the other 49 companies agree to a partnership if they're helping build a moat that keeps them out?
I think the point the above poster is trying to make is that the point here is that they don't want to share the data. Instead google (and atlassian/SAP/whoever) would like to make an "open" but limiting interface mediated through their agents, such that you can never get actual access to the data, but only what they decide you get to have.
To put it bluntly, the point of creating the open interface at this level, is that you get to close off everything else.
This is insanely cynical. The optimistic version is that many teams were already home-rolling protocols like A2A for "swarm" logic. For example, aggregation of financial data across many different streams, where a single "executive" agent would interface with many "worker" high-context agents that know a single stream.
I had been working on some personal projects over the last few months that would've benefitted enormously from having this kind of standard A2A protocol available. My colleagues and I identified it months ago as a major need, but one that would require a lot of effort to get buy-in across the industry, and I'm happy to see that Google hopped in to do it.
Companies who are betting their future on LLMs realized a few years ago that the data they can legally use is the only long term difference between them, aka “moat.”
Now that everyone has more or less the same public data access, and a thin compute moat is still there, the goal is to transfer your private textual data to them forever so they have an ever updating and tuned set of models for your data