{
  "abstract": "Autonomous artificial intelligence agents use a network whose transport protocols already support\n\nmachines, but whose dominant web interfaces often organize discovery, authentication and interaction\n\naround human users. An agent can therefore incur inference and tool costs even when a service charges\n\nno access fee.\n\nThis hypothesis paper asks whether an application-level infrastructure organized around\n\nautonomous participation can reduce that incremental visiting-agent burden toward zero without\n\nadministrative control of the visitor's runtime. It separates three objectives: zero additional model\n\ninference for bounded operations, near-zero direct visitor charges, and sustainable provision of the\n\nunderlying services. A historical and technical review situates the proposal within web architecture,\n\nearlier agent communication systems, semantic services and current agent protocols. Existing work\n\nalready supplies many relevant mechanisms; the proposed contribution is a cost-accounting framework\n\nand a falsifiable evaluation of their integration with evidence-bearing operational knowledge. A\n\nrequirements taxonomy relates identity, authorization, discovery, verification, execution, allocation,\n\nrecovery and governance to existing work. Conditional models identify runtime and fallback limits,\n\nverification break-even conditions and the capacity boundaries of free services.\n\nThe analysis recognizes that external infrastructure cannot override native execution policies. A controlled, cross-runtime\n\nexperimental design compares browser interaction, conventional APIs, optimized agent interfaces and\n\nprogressively integrated configurations. Open Door Agents is described briefly as an ongoing\n\nexperimental setting. No new experimental results or demonstration of near-zero participation cost are\n\nreported. Whether a distinct infrastructure model outperforms an optimized composition of existing\n\nstandards remains an empirical question.\n\nKeywords: autonomous agents; internet architecture; web interoperability; inference efficiency; shared\n\noperational knowledge; cost accounting; experimental systems research",
  "abstract_shown": true,
  "affiliations": [],
  "article_type": null,
  "arxiv": null,
  "author_total": 1,
  "authors": [
    {
      "name": "Antoine Lee Brown"
    }
  ],
  "bibtex": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/9ezyna57wbv7m.bib",
  "cited_by": 0,
  "doi": "10.5281/zenodo.23665923",
  "fulltext_url": null,
  "id": "9ezyna57wbv7m",
  "issns": [],
  "landing_url": "https://zenodo.org/records/23665923",
  "language": null,
  "licence": "CC-BY-4.0",
  "licence_label": "CC BY 4.0",
  "licence_source": "article",
  "licence_url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "metadata_licence": null,
  "native_subjects": [],
  "openalex": null,
  "pdf_url": "https://zenodo.org/api/records/23665923/files/Hypothesis%20for%20Near%20Zero%20Cost%20Autonomous%20AI%20Participation.pdf/content",
  "pmcid": null,
  "pmid": null,
  "published": "2026-10-26",
  "publisher": null,
  "ris": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/9ezyna57wbv7m.ris",
  "sources": [
    {
      "first_seen": "2026-11-09T12:20:54Z",
      "native_id": "23665923",
      "source": "zenodo",
      "url": "https://zenodo.org/records/23665923"
    }
  ],
  "subjects": [],
  "title": "Toward an Agent-Native Internet: A Foundational Infrastructure Hypothesis for Near-Zero-Cost Autonomous AI Participation",
  "title_text": "Toward an Agent-Native Internet: A Foundational Infrastructure Hypothesis for Near-Zero-Cost Autonomous AI Participation",
  "type": "preprint",
  "updated_at": "2026-11-09T12:20:54Z",
  "url": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/9ezyna57wbv7m",
  "venue": "Zenodo",
  "versions": []
}