Written by Brook Schaaf

This could just as easily be Chromium, Part 400, given how many products Google has launched—and killed (305 tombstones, by one count). But for our purposes, this is Part IV. 

Part one was Google search, a latecomer that laid out a crowded market of a dozen portals, directories, and search engines, including Excite, Lycos, AltaVista, Ask Jeeves (RIP), and Yahoo!, then already public for three years. The second part was the web app era, a tour de force of products bought or built between 2005 and 2011, from Gmail and Maps to Docs and YouTube. Yes, Chrome and Android were also launched in this era (2008 and 2010), but they deserve their own billing as part three because of their distribution, so powerful that the DOJ sought but failed to win a forced divestiture of Chrome as a monopoly remedy.

Part four has just begun. Google is leading a consortium of marketplaces, retailers, and payment processors in launching the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), “an open-source standard designed to power the next generation of agentic commerce” that will enable “seamless commerce journeys between consumer surfaces, businesses, and payment providers.” Said plainly, it turns commerce into a layer instead of a destination.

And no destination means no waypoints. 

No waypoints means fewer opportunities for intermediaries to exist at all. 

On his Retailgentic podcast, former ChannelAdvisor CEO Scott Wingo hosted Ashish Gupta, one of the key figures behind UCP at Google, who shared a fairly mundane origin story: the software took its cue from 1) emerging consumer behavior (“going very, very deep”) and 2) “agentic technology is finally catching up.”

Examples of going deep include “looking for deals” and “looking for reviews.” Hmm. What kind of sites do you suppose publish deals and reviews? Perhaps affiliate sites and other publishers, whose content is extracted without remuneration? Without evincing any sense of irony, Gupta also said this open-source solution “needs to work for the entire ecosystem.” Rich attributes may mean rich query responses, but they can’t provide rich context. Neither can they reveal the full range of pricing, which is often complex or concealed, even for simple product purchases. 

Reading (er, listening) between the lines, my take was that Google sees this as a critical opportunity to capture more of whatever the future customer journey is, though this reach is not without risks. 

First, Google has more than once tried and failed to become the be-all marketplace. Wingo mentioned “naysayers,” referencing past efforts like Google Shopping Marketplace and Buy on Google. Today, most shopping searches still start on Amazon, so it’s kind of a sequel in this sense, too. 

Second, with Chromium, Google gave up a whisker to take the lion’s share of the browser market. With this uncertain future shopping pattern, it’s conceivable that others (even publishers) could run off with it. Presumably, this has been taken into account. It’s also conceivable that AI will get so advanced that multiple universal protocols exist. While most eyes are on ChatGPT and Amazon, Anthropic is running its own experiment—an internal, AI-mediated “Project Deal” over Slack. 

So the ending of this movie, which you and I are both in, is unknown. UCP might well become the expectation for a large portion of transactions. It might also fail to gain user trust or enough operability (for example, on Amazon) to achieve lofty usage goals. If past reels are any guide, this latest effort at world domination may be destined for the graveyard. 

The deeper play is familiar: give away the rails to capture the traffic. Chromium did it for browsing. UCP attempts it for commerce. Whether that trade still works in an AI-mediated world is, for now, an open question. 

The post Chromium, Part IV appeared first on FMTC.