Agentic commerce — the demand-gatekeeper shift (new) Intermediaries that sell friction lose the customer; networks, trust layers and owners of identity/memory gain

2026-SEP-18 (Carlson): the risk is "not automation" but losing the customer: once software moves "from answering a question to completing a transaction," the agent becomes the demand gatekeeper. Stages: chatbots (incumbents keep execution) → authorized action (the incumbent "may lose the session entirely") → memory (convenience becomes distribution) → machine-to-machine commerce. Citrini's habitual intermediation: marketplaces that "look like networks, but behave economically like habits" are exposed, because an agent checks every option every time. Coordinators (OpenTable, Booking) lose more than executors (DoorDash, Uber); search ads that capture declared intent are compressed more than feed ads that create it (Meta over Google). Plumbing being built in public: Google's Universal Commerce Protocol, Microsoft Foundry hosted agents, Visa/Mastercard agent tokens. Falsifier: agents that never beat the incumbents' own interfaces. Joseph Carlson (2026-SEP-21): the map's first live test — Amazon blocked Meta's Muse agent ("unauthorized AI agent"), citing security/credentials; Carlson calls that bogus (a logged-out Muse is blocked too) and says the real motive is defending sponsored listings behind a $76B high-margin ad business, plus disintermediation of the customer touch point and Muse bypassing Amazon's Rufus assistant. Agents that crawl every listing for the best deal devalue paid placement. He expects the block to be temporary — the opening of a negotiation toward revenue-sharing / certified agent access — because a standoff grows costlier for the incumbent as the agent scales (Walmart could open up instead); the block itself validates the agent.