Agentic commerce is here. ACP & UCP promise checkout in ChatGPT & Gemini. Soon hundreds of millions of consumers around the globe will find better products, merchants will have improved conversion rates, and platforms will be able to take 5-10%. But checkout in ChatGPT is an incremental improvement. It will not reshape society as the internet did in the early 2000s. Open Agentic Commerce will. We must go back to the '90s to understand why. There were two different competing versions of 'the internet' at the time. AOL's: One price, mail, weather, additional approved content, and eventually the whole Time Warner content library. Open protocols: HTTP, DNS, HTML, and a browser called Mosaic Mosaic looked completely ridiculous compared to the first. There were so few sites on Mosaic's internet that there was no need for search, an alphabetical index was sufficient. 8 years later, AOL merged with Time Warner in a $350B merger of equals. The market had decided. The curated content bundle was the path forward. But it was not too long until Mosaic and the open protocols won, and human civilization stepped forward into the digital age. Why? Consider if walled gardens had won. Mark Zuckerberg wants to start The Facebook in 2004. He needs a distribution deal with AOL. Two kids at Stanford want to index the web, they need CompuServe's permission. A guy wants to sell books online from his garage, he needs to pitch MSN's content team. "Go back to school little boys", they say. None of it happens. The entire digital economy we take for granted simply doesn't exist. Open protocols meant no gatekeepers. Anyone with a server and a domain name could reach the entire internet. The edges innovated, the center couldn't keep up, and the result was the largest wealth creation event in human history. It's a fundamental principle of capitalism: innovation comes from the edges. Back to 1997: Tim Berners Lee, Marc Andreessen & co were working on the protocols and the browser. At the time, running a server cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. It was not obvious why a content server would respond to an unknown consumer. It would be expensive to do so, and there was no known financial incentive. They created a message called '402' that a server could send to a consumer: this content is available, for a small fee. But there was no sensible way to pay digitally. Paypal did not yet exist, and credit cards had fixed fees in the tens-of-cents, far too high for 1-cent micro-transactions. But the web took off anyway. Google figured out an odd business model for the internet: ads. In historical media the primary economic relationship is between the content producer and the consumer. Building on the economics of broadcast, Google helped introduce a third party, the advertiser, to pay for the relationship between the producer and consumer. Ingenious. Now producers could monetize the attention of the viewer. No need for any prior relationship with the consumer. Google sat in the money flow, between the advertiser and content producer, charging whatever take rates they wanted. So the need for micropayments was averted. Open source software got off the ground, the cloud revolution happened, hosting costs plummeted 100x. Google became the biggest proponent of the free and open internet. The more consumers searched, the more money Google made. So they invested hundreds of billions to make the internet fast, cheap and ubiquitous. And then in the 2010s, nothing happened. Interest rates were low, technology changed slowly, the walled gardens fed their troops and gathered strength. In 2022, ChatGPT launched, and the world was set to change again. LLMs could do more than deliver results, they could generate and compile many such results into a handy summary, often without touching the content itself. By GPT-4, it was clear agents were the next step: LLMs adept at using computers like humans, only cheaper and more effective. And just like that, the economics of the internet changed. The business model from 1997 to 2024 was distraction. Humans reading a webpage can be distracted by an advert, monetizing their partial attention. LLMs / Agents do not get distracted. There is some beautiful irony in ads creating the free and open internet, which became the 10 trillion token dataset that created LLMs, leading to the downfall of ads. StackOverflow views are down 75% since GPT-4, Tech news traffic down 60% etc. Tech consumers are early adopters, but it's coming for all information on the web. Checkout in ChatGPT doesn't matter. The internet is civilization's town square and the economic contract is now obsolete. There are small pockets of the internet that have defended themselves from Google's reach, the proverbial walled gardens with truly differentiated content: Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn. Which are resistant to bot automated scraping thanks to thousands of highly paid engineers working around the clock. But walled garden defenses just broke too. Computer-use