Executive Summary

I just got back from 2 weeks of vacation and catching up on all that transpired. No one reads this blog for its technical depth, but a few browse it for the economic implications and power struggles going on behind the scenes (hence “inside baseball”).

I/O 2026 was last week (see product announcements). The Commerce team showed how Universal Cart, Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) and Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) would drive a frictionless revolution in digital commerce.  By consolidating products from Search, Gemini, YouTube, and Gmail into a single persistent cart, Google is attempting to establish itself as the default transaction and orchestration layer of the internet. While consumers would love to engage across any platform and any retailer from any device…. A universal cart is also necessary for operating across any agentic platform and “specialist”.  Agentic commerce is certainly gaining traction, but Walmart’s Rufas and Amazon’s Alexa also want to play in the game at the front end (so does Open AI)

Wallet expansion to universal cart is great for Google; however, it’s not great for everyone else, as platforms make for poor custodians (i.e., they are not neutral). Particularly when it comes to controlling credentials and measuring their own effectiveness.  My concerns here are shared by retailers, banks, processors and networks as this architecture conceals a profound structural conflict over control and economic value.  Google’s “own-it-all” will create a great customer experience, and allow them to move agentic from the current “conversational commerce to merchant checkout” state, but who wants to invest in a platform where they become disintermediated, or a dumb fulfillment pipe?