Almost everyone in e-commerce is watching the agents. Who builds the best one? Which platform becomes the shopping channel? Who buys whom? Meta picked up both sides of the shopping conversation in September, and the question came almost automatically. Does Meta now own commerce?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
No. Not at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The agent is the part being given away. The spectacle is absorbing the attention. The value sits elsewhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For thirty years, the question was who owned the customer. Control access and the margin followed. Every platform argument since the first online store has been a variation on that theme. We have repeated it so often that it now passes for the only question worth asking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is becoming secondary. Access loses its value as an advantage when a machine can provide it cheaply.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The question replacing it sounds administrative. Whose authorization counts when nobody has clicked “Buy”? There is nothing administrative about the consequence. It determines who pays when the purchase goes wrong. Whoever pays gets to set the terms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In November 2025, Amazon sued Perplexity in federal court in Northern California. Perplexity’s Comet browser used customers’ credentials to log into Amazon accounts, compare products and place orders. Amazon alleged that it disguised its requests as ordinary browser traffic, violated Amazon’s terms and kept going after repeated warnings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In March 2026, the court sided with Amazon and barred Comet from shopping. The appeals court lifted that injunction in August. Its reasoning is the sentence worth paying attention to. The computer fraud statute, written in 1986, concerns access by a person. The agent was\u00a0a tool, not a person<\/a>. The user had accessed Amazon, not Perplexity, because the requests ran through the user’s own device.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A screwdriver, then. One that places orders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One judge observed that a law from 1986 had not been written for this situation. The decision addressed who was doing the shopping. It did not address who pays when the tool makes a mistake. The lawsuit concerned computer misuse, not money.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That ruling does not govern Europe. The comparison is still useful. America is reaching for a criminal statute from the modem era because it has nothing more suitable. Europe has almost the reverse problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Further than many assume. But a person still confirms the sensitive step.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Muse, Meta’s personal agent, launched in the United States on September 8 and in Canada on September 18. It is unavailable in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and Ireland. Meta has announced no date for those markets. Europeans debating the product are debating something they cannot yet use there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Meta says Muse keeps working in the background and “asks before taking sensitive actions”, including purchases. Payments go through Stripe’s Link, directly at more than a million merchants. Elsewhere, Link issues the agent\u00a0a single-use virtual card<\/a>\u00a0tied to the approved purchase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is the mandate, made tangible. A piece of plastic without the plastic. Valid for one amount, one merchant, one transaction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is now an agent on the merchant’s side too. It serves product data in a form models can read, answers questions, completes straightforward sales and handles tracking and refunds afterward. Mastercard released “the merchant toolkit” in January and added a single integration for merchants, agents and payment providers in September.<\/p>\n\n\n\n How far will that go? Europe has no survey that answers the question. The United States, Brazil and the United Arab Emirates do. Among “1,185 merchants”, 46 percent were reluctant to hand pricing and the final amount to an agent. Forty-two percent cited fraud, disputes and liability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Price and liability, almost level. The merchants are weighing who captures the benefit against who carries the risk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The mandate has two parts, and they have different owners.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The first is identification: proof that the agent is genuine and acting for a particular person. Visa has developed a protocol that cryptographically signs that identity into request headers, bound to the merchant’s domain and the specific transaction. Timestamps and session identifiers guard against replay. Visa then puts\u00a0the specification on GitHub<\/a>, with a working example and a key registry. Twelve partners, from Adyen and Shopify to Worldpay, joined at the outset. Several are European.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Generous? No. A commercial move.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Open one layer, turn it into a commodity and the profit shifts to the adjacent layer. “Christensen described the mechanism”. IBM demonstrated it with the open PC architecture in 1981 and lost the industry to Microsoft. It is an old move. It works for whoever already controls the neighboring layer. The card networks do, on both sides of the Atlantic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The second part is the signature. Authorization. That part cannot simply be given away. Who consented, within what limit, at which merchant? Did the agent ask for confirmation? What did it actually do? In a dispute, all of that has to be demonstrable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Evidence is not enough. Someone still has to pay. That requires a license and capital.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Visa’s announcement says “nothing about liability”. Not a word.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Within days, Meta had occupied both sides of the shopping conversation. Muse acts for the buyer. A business agent talks to customers through WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram. In early September, Meta added Stilla, a Stockholm team “eight months into the market”. Former Shopify employees founded it, raised $5 million in pre-seed funding and built a company agent with shared context and permissions for individual users across Slack, Linear, GitHub and Notion. The acquisition price was not disclosed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Reach, channel, both agents. Three out of four. Payments go through Stripe, with Shop Pay and PayPal also connected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The platform opened to developers on September 18. “More than 1,500 applications” arrived in less than a week. Best Buy, Gap, Sephora, Walmart, Wayfair and Expedia are connected; Instacart is to follow. Reach becomes a directory. A merchant outside it will not be found. That is a harder currency than an advertising slot. It cannot simply be bought as an add-on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The fourth part still requires a license. Money alone does not secure one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The buyer protection makes the distinction visible. Muse is the first agent covered by Link’s protection, including compensation for damage or loss, a price guarantee and free returns. Stripe provides that protection. Meta does not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n None of Meta’s announcements that month says who pays when a transaction through one of those connections goes wrong. Neither the Muse announcement nor the platform announcement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The merchant owns the customer relationship. Meta controls the channel. Responsibility for the purchase sits with someone neither announcement identifies. While those three belonged together, the question hardly arose. Now they are separating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Joining that directory is an ownership decision presented as a technical integration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For a European merchant, this is the distinction that matters. America has the agent and is searching for the law. Europe is closer to having the law before the agent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Under the European payment services directive, initiating a payment on a customer’s behalf is a regulated payment service. An agent does not turn it into a technical detail. The provider needs its own authorization or a licensed partner. There is an exemption for purely technical service providers, provided they never hold customer funds. A complete agent shopping product therefore does not reach the European market on its own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What happens when the agent gets the purchase wrong? If faulty price recognition or hallucination produces a purchase outside the customer’s instructions, the payment is generally unauthorized and the payment service provider reimburses it. The provider often cannot explain why the agent made that decision, leaving it with no argument against the claim.<\/p>\n\n\n\nHow far the agents actually go<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Why Visa gives something away<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Meta controls plenty, but not everything<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Europe has already named the player<\/h2>\n\n\n\n