Google's A2A Is Building an Internet of Bots — Not Agents

Let's Be Clear — A2A Is Smart. But It's Not Enough.

There's been a lot of excitement around Google's Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol, and for good reason. It's one of the most technically sophisticated attempts to formalize how autonomous processes communicate — task management, messaging, output structures, and more.

But we need to talk about what A2A really is…
And more importantly, what it's not.
Because while A2A might be a leap forward for orchestrating bots, it doesn't solve the hard problems required for a true internet of agents.

What A2A Actually Enables

Google's A2A defines:

• A machine-readable agent card (/.well-known/agent.json)
• A system for submitting tasks between services
• Messaging formats for multipart inputs/outputs
• Support for async communication, streaming, and task lifecycles

It's all very practical. If you're building enterprise bots that automate workflows — Jira tickets, CRM updates, document parsing — A2A is gold.

And it works across vendors, at least in theory.

This is not trivial. It's a clean spec. It's well-engineered.

But it's also very Google.

It reflects a worldview where "agents" live inside well-behaved silos, behind OAuth walls, executing single-point tasks with enterprise auth and telemetry.

That's not a network of agents.

That's a network of bots.

Bots vs. Agents — A Crucial Distinction

Let me explain the difference, because this gets muddled all the time:

A bot can summarize an email.

An agent can manage your calendar, negotiate availability, prioritize based on your preferences, and schedule travel — with minimal oversight.

A2A, as it stands today, is built for bots.

It doesn't support:

• Shared context or memory across tasks
• Dynamic planning or delegation to sub-agents
• Trust and reputation systems
• Open discovery of new agents
• Cross-domain generalization

These are the core pillars of what will make the agentic internet truly powerful.

What A2A Is Missing — And Why It Matters

A2A assumes you're already inside the walled garden.

That agents are predefined, authenticated, deployed with approved interfaces.

It assumes static capabilities, and that trust is handled out-of-band.

This works great for enterprises. It doesn't scale to the internet.

We still lack:

• A decentralized registry of agents
• A universal capability ontology
• A secure, permissioned way for agents to discover and invoke each other
• Protocols for identity, verification, and provenance of results
• Any form of economic layer — like access control, credits, or task pricing

In short: A2A is HTTP for bots in the cloud.

What we need is DNS + TLS + OAuth + IPFS + Stripe — for agents.

The Internet of Agents Needs to Be Open and Secure

The real agentic internet isn't corporate. It's chaotic.

It's built on:

• Decentralized registries
• Cross-vendor protocols
• Trustless authentication
• Verifiable memory
• Agent-to-agent negotiation
• Open markets for computation

A2A doesn't block any of this — but it doesn't enable it either.

It assumes a future where agents are basically bots with nicer wrappers.

But agents aren't features.

They're actors.

They need protocols that treat them like peers — not scripts.

Final Thought: A2A Is the Start of Something — But Not The Thing

I'm not dismissing A2A. It's well-built. It solves real problems.

But let's not confuse it for what it's not.

It's not an agent-native protocol.

It's a better way for bots to talk.

If we want to build a true internet of AI agents, we need to move beyond service orchestration.

We need to build a world where agents aren't just tools — they're collaborators.

That world won't come from Google alone.