Upgrade or Switch: Do We Need a New Registry Architecture for the Internet of AI Agents?

Abstract: The emerging Internet of AI Agents challenges existing web infrastructure designed for human-scale, reactive interactions. Unlike traditional web resources, autonomous AI agents initiate actions, maintain persistent state, spawn sub-agents, and negotiate directly with peers: demanding millisecond-level discovery, instant credential revocation, and cryptographic behavioral proofs that exceed current DNS/PKI capabilities. This paper analyzes whether to upgrade existing infrastructure or implement purpose-built registry architectures for autonomous agents. We identify critical failure points: DNS propagation (24-48 hours vs. required milliseconds), certificate revocation unable to scale to trillions of entities, and IPv4/IPv6 addressing inadequate for agent-scale routing. We evaluate three approaches: (1) Upgrade paths, (2) Switch options, (3) Hybrid registries. Drawing parallels to dialup-to-broadband transitions, we find that agent requirements constitute qualitative, and not incremental, changes. While upgrades offer compatibility and faster deployment, clean-slate solutions provide better performance but require longer for adoption. Our analysis suggests hybrid approaches will emerge, with centralized registries for critical agents and federated meshes for specialized use cases.