MCP was just a glorified way of tool calling but generated so much hype (and it eventually died down). Now we have MPP. Which again - could have just been another tool call exposed to the agent.
Imagine you hire someone who claimed to have invented a new protocol and you're thinking of something like TCP or UDP, but all they share is just a markdown file.
And as to use cases, if I want quality outputs for automated research and discovery of a topic, in a world where quality journalism/scholarship should be compensated and does use tools like Cloudflare to block automated access, and where AI-generated content is everywhere, it's optimal for me to want to spend some amount of the money I spend on tokens, on the ability for my agent to access reputable primary and secondary sources as needed.
The challenge, of course, is that now there's an incentive for a spam source to try to get my agent to pay it, rather than the actual creator of the content. But there are interesting ways to solve this, because with these payment rails there's now an incentive for alliances of content creators to maintain indices of reputable sources and their canonical domains - perhaps even authoritative hashes of content. Lots of possibilities here.
Is this an attempt to get multiple payment processors to adopt the same Payments API so that agents fail less often?
This MPP helps bridge the gap between the agent putting the product "in the basket", to actually completing the full purchase process.
Disclaimer: I'm not in any way advocating for this use case, but it's part of my job to understand how it works. Part of what I do is try to help Agents understand, for example, what is "an efficient dishwasher" using actual data, and not hallucinated info.
In other words, if Agents are able to navigate marketplaces, shouldn't that imply they can also navigate a subset of the marketplace, the payment section? Especially given that that section is "easier: theres no need for qualitative (or quantitative) judgement like there is for the shopping portion.
Perhaps its a matter of proper safeguards?
> You're absolutely right! The transaction was submitted as $500,000 instead of $5.00. Since that's what was entered on your end, you'll need to contact your bank to resolve it. I will generate a letter for you to print, sign, and send to your bank if needed. Would you like me to generate a bankruptcy filing for you as well?
Yeah I read that copy too, did you read the spec?
A well thought out proposal for the long term, unlike MCP which is a complete joke of a "standard" and broken by design.
[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ryan-httpauth-payment...