At IETF 126 in Vienna this week, a Birds-of-a-Feather session called agentproto took up a question that's been left to individual vendors until now: whether agent-to-agent communication needs an open, binding internet standard rather than de facto defaults set by protocols like MCP and A2A. The session followed groundwork from a related BoF, DMSC, which mapped what it calls the AI agent gateway model — the layer that sits between an orchestrating agent and the downstream agents or tools it invokes. That gateway has to handle several distinct jobs at once: exposing what an agent can do, routing a request to the right downstream service, reconciling results from parallel agent threads, deciding who's authorized to trigger an action, giving humans a way to audit what happened, and letting a receiving agent verify the sender's identity and the integrity of what it sent. That last list is notable because it's essentially the whole stack of agent infrastructure problems in one paragraph — discovery, routing, identity, and audit — and it's exactly the fragmentation that's made multi-agent systems hard to run at scale so far. Two protocols, MCP and A2A, are already deployed widely enough that IETF standardization would either have to formalize what's already shipping or risk being ignored. One report on the session noted MCP alone sees roughly 97 million downloads a month, which is the kind of installed base that makes a standards body's job harder, not easier: codify the incumbent, or try to fix its gaps before they calcify. The stakes for orchestration specifically are concrete. Without a shared gateway spec, every platform that wants to let one agent call another has to invent its own answer to coordination and synchronization — how parallel agent threads reconcile results — and its own answer to policy control. That's fine when a company runs a single closed system. It breaks down the moment agents from different vendors need to hand off tasks to each other, which is the direction the industry is visibly heading given the parallel rush of announcements this month around agent identity, payments, and cross-app access protocols. A working-group charter, if agentproto's session produces one, wouldn't ship an RFC this year. But it would mark the first time the IETF formally took up agent-to-agent communication as internet infrastructure rather than an application-layer concern for individual companies to sort out. Session materials are being posted to the IETF Datatracker as the week's sessions conclude.