You're arguing against your own straw man. "Imagine, for example if booking.com built an MCP server allowing you to book a hotel room (…) no hiding or limiting data." They're not doing that and they're not interested in that. Yes, they would need a public API for that and people could use it directly. But that's not happening.
MCP makes sense where the API already exists and makes the biggest difference if the API call is just a part of the process, not the only and final action.
Even in the booking example, you could push much more of your context into the process and integrate other tools. Rank the results by parking availability or distance to the nearest public/street parking, taking your car's height into account, looking through reviews for phrases you care about (soft bed, child care, ...) and many others things. So now we've got already 4+ different tools that need to work together, improving the results.
I think you missed the point.
To "rank the results by parking availability" you need the results. Currently these are behind paid API keys or frontends with ads.
Why would booking.com allow you to download their entire set of results multiple times through an API for free, when they charge people for that?
So what? You’re basically claiming that it’ll fail because some companies won’t want to provide too much value for free.
But that’s such a small part of the equation here. If GitHub has an MCP server, you’re still paying them to host your code (potentially), and you get the benefit of agents being able to access GitHub in your development workflow (say, to look for similar issues or start work on things).
Yes, not every company will shove their data into AI agents. But can you take various tools and plug them together using agents to power up your workflows? That’s what these projects are thinking about. And there are vast numbers of tools which would happily integrate into this process.
> So what? You’re basically claiming that it’ll fail because some companies won’t want to provide too much value for free.
> If GitHub has an MCP server, you’re still paying them to host your code (potentially)
So are you saying that all uses of MCP that rely on data you don't own or pay someone to store are not likely to exist?
I would agree with that point of view, but I'm not sure you do even though you are the one sharing it.