The Case for Us: Why the Agentic Web Needs Contracts, Not Consent

When software moves from apps you control to orchestration that happens autonomously, consent becomes a relic. Lets work on a new durable, respectful standard for the next era of the web.

I’m exhausted by trying to manage the surveillance infrastructure that surrounds my digital presence. You probably are too.

Nearly every app I use, every website I visit, every “free” service I sign up for are all playing a similar game. They collect my data, attempt to track everything I do, sell manufactured insights about me to advertisers, and then act like they’re doing me a favor. That world has to fundamentally change, especially if we are to protect our data rights in an era of Agentic AI.

Something significant is happening to alter the path forward. MyTerms, the IEEE 7012 standard for Machine Readable Personal Privacy Terms is now officially available to build with. I believe it’s a missing part of the protocol framework that will make the emerging agentic web actually work for people instead of against them. (full disclosure, my fellow board members at Customer Commons were deeply involved in the creation of MyTerms).

The Great Unwinding Demands New Rules

In my recent post on the year ahead, I described how we’re witnessing the “great unwinding” of enterprise software stacks. The traditional monolithic application will be hollowed out, replaced by a new orchestration layer where AI agents coordinate actions across fragmented systems without human intervention.

Among other things, this orchestration layer fundamentally will break the old “notice and consent” model. When AI agents are making thousands of decisions per second on your behalf, such as checking supply chains, updating forecasts, drafting contextualized outreach, there’s simply no time for humans to read privacy policies and click consent buttons.

We’re moving from a world where you go to software to a world where software works for you. But who controls that software when it’s working for you? Under what terms? With what constraints?

Why Consent Becomes Impossible

The shift from apps to actions, from interfaces you control to orchestration that happens autonomously, makes traditional consent literally impossible to execute. When your personal AI agent encounters a new service to accomplish a given task, it can’t stop and ask you to review a 10,000-word privacy policy. These consent requirements are bemusing in our current world and farcical in the agentic web that’s taking shape. This is where most people assume we lose. That the agentic future is inevitably one where we surrender even more control to surveillance-oriented systems that make decisions about our data without our meaningful input.

But there’s another path. And it requires replacing consent with something more robust: bilateral agreements, contracts, that can accomplish what we’ve had in the physical world for milennia, a durable mechanism to engage equally between two parties.

Contracts as part of the Protocol Layer

Binding agreements between parties is precisely what IEEE 7012 enables. Instead of “take it or leave it” consent, MyTerms provides the protocol for genuine bilateral contracts in the orchestration layer.

The mechanics of this are quite simple, and scalable. You choose your privacy terms from a standard roster maintained by a neutral nonprofit. These terms are simple and clear: what data can be collected, how it can be used, whether it can be shared, and what rights you have. They are published as human readable variants of legalese and are machine readable for agentic execution.

When your AI agent encounters a new service while orchestrating actions on your behalf, it automatically presents your terms to their system. The service reads those terms and either accepts them or proposes an alternative from the same standard roster. If both sides agree, the contract is digitally signed, recorded, and enforceable. If they don’t agree, your agent logs that as well, and gives you a choice on how to proceed. This will happen in milliseconds, automatically, at the orchestration layer. But unlike consent, it’s a real agreement with legal weight on both sides.

The New Surface Needs New Foundations

As I described in my look ahead, we’re also seeing interfaces become spatial as the world itself become an interactive surface. When the interface is everywhere and AI operators are managing complex systems too fast for human cognition, the only way to protect individual agency is through machine-readable contracts that travel with your data.

MyTerms becomes the essential protocol that allows you to maintain sovereignty even as you benefit from the orchestration layer. Your terms become enforceable conditions that any service wanting to interact with your agent must respect.

Building a Fair Agentic Web

Without MyTerms, the orchestration layer defaults to the current state of surveillance-driven control. Services dictate terms, agents comply, and individuals become even more thoroughly the product. This will only accelerate disempowerment of individuals and with dubious consent agreements.

But with MyTerms as a foundational protocol, something different may become possible. When millions of personal agents operate under MyTerms contracts, services that abuse customer data may become unsustainable on the agentic web. They won’t be able participate in the orchestration layer because agents representing people simply expose irrational, or onerous terms, and route around them.

Meanwhile, services that embrace MyTerms will become discoverable and preferred. The orchestration layer will favor companies that compete on how well they respect customer terms rather than how cleverly they exploit customer data.

The Path Forward

IEEE 7012 is now officially available. Although there’s been nearly a decade worth of investigation, research, and development to establish MyTerms, the work to enable it is just emerging. The people who get involved now will shape the next phase. That means learning about agent-to-agent contracts, supporting services that implement MyTerms, and demanding that the orchestration layer respects individual agency.

In the age of AI operators and spatial interfaces, consent is obsolete. Contracts are essential. And MyTerms is the protocol that makes a fair, robust, and human-centered agentic web possible.

Are you in? Learn more, and sign-up for the MyTerms Alliance here.