Let’s talk about the open standard everyone cheered — and the meter that got bolted onto it while the cheering was still going.
Before this was technology, it was a shipping container.
In the old way, every company packed goods in its own shape, and every port moved them in its own way. Costly, slow, a mess. So the industry did the sensible thing. It agreed on the box. Same size, same corners, same locks. Anyone could build one. The box stopped being the business.
And then the money moved. To the cranes. To the ports. To whoever owned the yard the box had to pass through.
That is the shape of the thing I want to show you today. The box got free. The yard got expensive.
On the 9th of December 2025, Anthropic gave the Model Context Protocol away. Donated it to the Agentic AI Foundation, a fund under the Linux Foundation. MCP became a founding project. The foundation was co-founded by Anthropic, Block and OpenAI, with support from Google, Microsoft, AWS, Cloudflare and Bloomberg. At that point MCP had 97 million SDK downloads a month and about ten thousand active servers.
People read that as the end of the story. Open protocol. Neutral home. Nobody owns the road. Good news.
Then look at the 28th of July 2026 spec. Close to half a billion downloads a month by then. The TypeScript and Python kits past a billion each. And the protocol changed in a very specific direction: no handshake, no session. Every request now carries its own version, its own client identity, its own capabilities. And the method and the tool name travel in the HTTP headers.
Read that line again, because it is the whole episode. The tool name is now in the header.
That change exists because big companies asked for it. They needed to run these servers behind a normal load balancer. They needed to rate limit. They needed to know what was being called. All reasonable. All good engineering.
It also means a gateway can see, count and price a single tool call without ever opening the body.
And the gateways are here. Cloudflare shipped a way for MCP servers to mix free tools and paid tools, with the developer setting a per-call price in dollars. The New Stack covered it on the 1st of October under a headline that asks the right question — who controls the agent’s spending. Their line is sharp: price becomes part of tool selection.
Sit with that. Your agent is choosing a tool. One costs four cents a call. One costs nothing and is almost as good. Which one does it pick? The cheap one, most of the time. Which means the thing you spent two years making excellent can lose to a thing that is adequate and cheaper, and no human ever looked at either.
Now the second half. The registry.
The official MCP Registry went into preview on the 8th of September 2025. Public servers only. No private ones. It lists what exists. It does not run payments. Fine.
So companies run their own. Azure API Center. AWS Agent Registry. Google Agent Registry, with an Agent Gateway that enforces the list at run time. That is not a catalogue. That is a door with a guard.
Think about what that means for a small team. Two people in an office somewhere, one good idea, a tool that does one job better than anyone. They get listed. They get traffic. Then the traffic starts arriving through somebody’s gateway, because that is how the buyer’s security team approved it. And one morning the tool that answers first is a competitor’s, and nobody at the small company can see the number that decided it.
They are not banned. They are just not picked.
Here is what people are missing.
First. Open describes the wire, not the business. The wire is free and it should be. The switchboard is a product, and it has an owner.
Second. The registry is the app store again, only quieter about it. Being listed is the whole game. And the list that matters inside a real company is private, run by the vendor, enforced by the vendor’s gateway. Your access is not your permission.
Third. Your usage data leaves. Which tools your customers actually call, how often, what fails, what they ask for next — that used to be your roadmap. Now it is somebody’s analytics dashboard.
Fourth, and this is the one that will cost people money. When the buyer’s agent compares per-call price, the price stops being yours. You are competing on a number inside a menu you do not own, judged by a machine that has never used your product.
None of this makes the foundation a villain. It makes it a foundation. Neutral stewardship of a protocol does not pay for anything. The companies on that board sell cloud, compute and gateways. Of course the value collected above the free layer.
So what do you actually do.
Keep a plain HTTP path that works with no gateway in front of it. Test it every month.
Own your auth. Your issuer, your tokens, your say over who gets in.
Log every call in your own store, with a request id you control, in a place you can read without asking anyone.
Write your tool contract down in your repo and run it against two different clients, so you find out what broke before a customer does.
Publish to more than one registry. Keep your own private one with tests in it.
Price the outcome, not the call. A per-call price is the easiest number in the world for a machine to compare and the worst number for a small team to defend.
And ask the plain question. If that gateway switched me off tomorrow morning, how many of my customers would notice? If the answer is all of them and you have no other road, you did not build a business. You built a tenant.
There is a human thing underneath all of this, and it is not about protocols.
A tool gets made by a person who knows exactly what problem it solves, because they watched someone struggle with it. The gateway never met that person. It met a manifest. When the selection is made on price and presence in a list, the reason the tool exists gets dropped out of the decision entirely.
That is how good work disappears without anyone deciding to kill it.
The principle worth keeping: a maker should be able to serve the person who chose them, without asking a gatekeeper’s permission first.
Open standards are how we get out of one cage. They are not a promise that nobody builds the next one.
You’ve got this. Keep your road open.