MCP is the coming of Web 2.0 2.0
105 comments
·May 23, 2025bad_haircut72
fidotron
> I think the opposite, MCP is destined to fail for the exact same reason the semantic web failed, nobody makes money when things aren't locked down.
I think this is right. MCP resembles robots.txt evolved into some higher lifeform, but it's still very much "describe your resources for us to exploit them".
The reason the previous agent wave died (it was a Java thing in the 90s) was eventually everyone realized they couldn't trust their code once it was running on a machine it's supposed to be negotiating with. Fundamentally there is an information assymetry problem between interacting agents, entirely by design. Take that away and huge swathes of society will stop functioning.
arbuge
"describe your resources for us to exploit them"
What you want to do is offer resources that make you money when they're "exploited".
fidotron
I would agree with that if there were no distinction between clients and servers. i.e. agents and LLMs are resources that should be discovered and exploited in the same exact way as anything else, and switchable in the same ways.
doug_durham
Plain human readable text is not an "artificial barrier". It the nature of our our world. Requiring that a restaurant publish menus in a metadata format is an artificial barrier. That the beauty of these new NLP tools. I don't need to have a restaurant owner learn JSON, or buy a software package that generates JSON. We can use data as it is. The cost of building useful tools goes to near zero. It will be imprecise, but that's what human language is.
lucideer
> It the nature of our our world.
It's the nature of capitalism.
Some forms of capitalism may have roots in the natural world - natural selection as both a destructive & wasteful competitive process certainly has a lot of parallels in idealised markets - but there's nothing inherent about your menu example when it comes to the modern human world, beyond restrictions placed upon us by capitalism.
> Requiring that a restaurant publish menus in a metadata format is an artificial barrier
This is oddly phrased as noone would need to require anyone to do anything - it's obviously beneficial to a restaurant to publish their menus in formats that are as broadly usable as they can. The only barrier to them doing that is access to tools.
The various hurdles you're describing ("buying" software, the "cost" of building tools) are not natural phenomena.
Y_Y
Plain text menus would have been fine
jjfoooo4
MCP is described as a means to make the web open, but it’s actually it’s a means to make demos of neat things you could do if the web were actually open.
jsnell
It's not just that nobody makes money providing a free and open API. It's that to operate such an API you'll basically need unlimited resources. No matter how many resources you throw at the problem, somebody will still figure out a way of exhausting those resources for marginal gains. MCP will just make the problem worse as AI agents descend on any open MCP servers like locusts.
The only stable option, I think, is going to be pay-per-call RPC pricing. It's at least more viable to do then it was for Web 2.0 APIs, since at least the entity operating the model / agent will act as a clearinghouse for all the payments. (And I guess their most likely billing model is to fold these costs into their subscription plans? That seems like the best way to align incentives.)
ljm
HATEOAS was the dream in the early 2010s and that basically went nowhere beyond generating swagger yaml, despite the fact it intended to make API consumption trivial.
Whoever coined it as HATEOAS basically set it up to fail though.
johnmaguire
> Whoever coined it as HATEOAS basically set it up to fail though.
I could never understand making the term "hate" so prominent.
dragonwriter
> HATEOAS was the dream in the early 2010s and that basically went nowhere
I dunno, HTTP/1.1, the motivating use case for REST and HATEOAS, seems to have been moderately successful.
badgersnake
MCP is just that again, but less well thought out. Everything new is old.
alberth
Sure - not many companies made money on "HTTP", but lots of people/companies made gobs of money by adopting it.
philosophty
I haven't paid close attention. Why can't people make money with MCP-based APIs? Why can't providers require API keys / payment to call their functions?
olalonde
Sure they can - they're just another API interface tailored for LLMs. I think parent and OP are in fact ranting about that (many APIs being locked behind signups or paywalls). Not sure I agree with the criticism though. In my view, web 2.0 was a huge success: we went from a world with almost no APIs to one where nearly every major website or app offers one. That's real progress, even if we didn't turn every business into an open data non-profit.
drusepth
> I think the opposite, MCP is destined to fail for the exact same reason the semantic web failed, nobody makes money when things aren't locked down.
Is there a way to handle "locking down" things with MCP? It seems like a potential opportunity for freemium services if they have a mechanism for authentication and telling the MCP caller "this user has access to these tools, but not _these_ yet".
seanhunter
Yes. MCP allows (and uses) exactly the same authentication mechanisms that any other rest or similar api allows. So if you have a service you want to expose (or not) via MCP you can do that in exactly the same way as you currently could do that for a rest API.
The difference for the user is instead of them having to make (or use) a special-purpose client to call your rest api, the llm (or llm powered application) can just call the api for them, meaning your rest service can be integrated into other llm-powered workflows.
jacob019
Fun writing, and something to think about. To me, Web 2.0 is kind of a joke; jQuery, REST, AJAX, CSS2, RSS, single page apps were going to change everything overnight, it was THE buzzword, and then... incremental improvements. In retrospect, everything did change, but that loose collection of technologies was just links in the chain of incremental progress. So yeah, Web 2.0 2.0 makes sense.
I've seen a lot of talk around here, and everywhere, about MCP. A lot of enthusiasm and a lot of criticism. I've written a few MCP servers and plan to write some more. It isn't how I would design a protocol, but it works, and everyone is using it, so hooray for interoperability.
I think the hype represents the wider enthusiasm that people have about this moment in time, and the transformative power of these new tools. It's easy to look at MCP and say there it is, now it's easy to connect these tools to the things that I care about, it feels accessible, and there's community.
MCP is NOT the new TCP for AI. It is, essentially, an RPC layer for chat. And while it could be extended to a wider variety of use cases, I expect that it will remain primarily a method for wiring up tool calls for user-facing use cases. We recognize the power of these tools and anticipate deep changes to workflows and systems, but we don't know how that will shake out. If I am writing a classifier for a backend system, I am not going to use MCP, even if I could. Because it's inefficient. Every additional tool we offer the model consumes tokens and increases latency. I expect that the primary user of LLMs is going to be business automation of all kinds, and I don't expect them to reach for MCP to wire things up. Yeah, it's really cool to hook tools up to the chat, for that to feel accessible, to know how to do things in an idiomatic and standards-compliant way, that feels good! And yeah, the hype is overblown.
tagfowufe
While I understand where the author is coming from, and I get his sentiment(s), I don't think what he proposes is actually possible: his vision relies on faux open tools and protocols and having access to walled gardens. The means of computation for these kinds of things are owned by a tiny minority. Nearly everything is a SaaS or is based, one way or the other, on rent extraction. We're essentially subject to the whims of someone who is letting us do something for as long as we play nice.
>There is a chance, though, that younger developers, and those who weren't around to build back during that last era a generation ago, are going to get inspired by MCP to push for the web to go back towards its natural architecture. It was never meant to be proprietary.
Alas, the reason APIs started closing and being metered is because, after all, there's someone owning and paying for the hardware upon which you are making calls and requests.
As long as there's no way to agree upon how to have a bunch of servers providing computation for anyone and at the same time ensuring their upkeep without the need for a central authority, I don't think such vision is sustainable long term. The current state of the Internet is proof of it.
zoogeny
> Compared to the olden days, when specs were written by pedantic old Unix dudes
I think that is one of the reasons (among many others) that the semantic web failed (which doesn't contradict the author, whose point is literally the worse-is-better mantra).
People really leaned into the eXtensible part of XML and I think a certain amount of fatigue set it. XSL, XHTML, XSD, WSDL, XSLT, RDF, RSS, et al. just became a bit too much. It was architecture astronautics for data formats when what the world at the time needed was simple interchange formats (and JSON fit the bill).
But I actually believe XML's time has come. I've noticed that XML appears a lot in leaked system prompts from places like Anthropic. LLMs appear to work very well with structured text formats (Markdown and XML specifically).
I believe that MCP is the wrong model, though. I believe we should be "pushing" context to the models rather than giving them directions on how to "pull" the context themselves.
null
nimish
Rent seeking is the name of the game for much of b2b SaaS.
MCP is an attempt to make that easy, but the issue here is that a lot of the companies offering integration could be disintermediated entirely by LLMs. Hard to say what that means.
daemonk
At a higher level, MCP seems wants to enforce a standard where no standard exists. I get that the low level technical implementation allows AI to utilize these tools.
But there doesn't seem to be any standardization or method in how to describe the tool to the AI so that it can utilize it well. And I guess part of the power of AI is that you shouldn't need to standardize that? But shouldn't there at least be some way to describe the tool's functionality in natural language or give some context to the tool?
lxgr
Turns out the “Semantic Web” was a syntactic web all along, and maybe this is the real deal?
1oooqooq
I pitty the fools thinking they will have access to anything because there's a MCP.
those things will be hidden behind a dozen layers of payment validation and authentication. And whitelisted IPs (v4, of course).
ERR 402; is all that will be visible to yall.
vivzkestrel
Everything seems to be susceptible to enshittification and so far I see no evidence that MCP is any exception. First the value will go to users, then the users ll cut short to drive value to shareholders and then it will turn to an absolute pile of garbage as businesses make every attempt to somehow cash in on this
RansomStark
MCP could have cracked the web opeb. The terrible standard was all about clients and local servers all on the same host.
Imagine it, everything is open, servers are as simple as a pip install ... You have full control of what servers you install. What functions you turn on, what access you allow.
Now everyone and their blog is sticking MCPs on their servers and locking them down behind subscriptions and paywalls.
What a wasted opportunity.
freeone3000
And what pays for the resources used serving your (hundreds of) requests against a “local” server? For computer control, sure, but actual remote services have actual remote costs.
quantadev
We can now build the Semantic Web. All we have to do is create a tiny protocol (as an optional extension to MCP) for how organizations can share their SQL Table Create DDL as a static file that MCP apps can read, to understand data, and then, using the already-existing tools for AI/LLM function calling to SQL, that would become a Semantic Web.
That would fill the missing link that always held back the Semantic Web which was the lack of any incentive for companies to bother to use a standard "Data Type" rather than all proprietary data types. Once we have an MCPQ (MCP with Queries), suddenly there's an incentive for organizations to collaborate at the data structure layer.
"The rise of MCP gives hope that the popularity of AI amongst coders might pry open all these other platforms to make them programmable for any purpose, not just so that LLMs can control them."
I think the opposite, MCP is destined to fail for the exact same reason the semantic web failed, nobody makes money when things aren't locked down.
It makes me wonder how much functionality of things like AI searching the web for us (sorry, doing "deep-research") might have been solved in better ways. We could have had restaurants publish their menus in a metadata format and anyone could write a python script to say find the cheapest tacos in Texas, but no, the left hand locks down data behind artificial barriers and then the right hand builds AI (datacenters and all) to get around it. On a macro level its just plain stupid.