What I Think About The MCP vs A2A Theory

Anthropic and Google have published open protocols to enhance interaction of AI Agents. While Anthropic's MCP (Model Context Protocol) focuses on agent's integration with tools (to fetch realtime data or DB content), Google's A2A (Agent to Agent) focuses on interaction between different agents themselves.

While MCP and A2A do seem complementary to each other, it does make you wonder, as a developer, if this is the start of protocol wars between tech giants. Due to lack of a central governing body currently (too soon to make that yet, but hopefully sometime in the future) each company can setup protocols on how they think agents should interact. The popularity of such protocols can be assessed only when the adoption kicks in by the community. While this is a good start, it can very easily be biased. It also puts a certain 'mandate' on integrating applications to work (interact) in a certain way.

If you look back, whenever new technology emerges, tech companies prefer using (and promoting) their own standards and protocols, probably because it works better for their ecosystem. But eventually it creates a mess for consumers and developers who now have to manage things differently for each product.

For example, in 2000s there was the Browser War where each internet browser company setup their own ways to render webpages. It was a painful time for the developers - having to put firefox, mozilla specific tags at the start of every HTML page and CSS stylesheets. Debugging and troubleshooting was a nightmare. Working with mobile pages was worse. What eventually helped was W3C that specified standards to use for every browsers to use. This made adoption and development far easier.

Another example is when phone companies decided to have different charging ports on different models. It does make sense in hindsight, since companies spend a fortune on RnD on fast charging tech, etc. The European Union’s mandate for a common charger, specifically USB-C, for mobile phones and other electronic devices is a recent standardization attempt, driven by goals to reduce e-waste and enhance consumer convenience.

I see a similar situation emerging with EVs and their charging infrastructure.

I personally believe investing in a common standard will do a world of good for everybody - consumers and the producers in the long run. It can drive mass adoption, bring down costs and complexities. But then again, it removes the X-factor, the uniqueness from your product which companies would not prefer.

All in all, this is a very good start to setup open protocols. It enables developers to focus on the business goal, and having the option to choose from different LLMs, rather than fiddling and tweaking with the wiring behind it.