Who's governing the Agentic Web? Formal Authority, Public Agendas, and Participation Across Nine Protocols

The Agentic Web is becoming an institutional as well as a computational system: shared protocols require rules for their own revision. Who controls the protocols that enable agents to discover, communicate, establish trust, and transact? We compare institutional governance across nine protocols and distinguish architectural openness, public participation, and binding authority. The comparison combines formal governance documents with 7,458 decision-relevant records; an intensive A2A/ERC-8004 study and a 34-standard ERC cluster provide separate evidence at different scopes. All nine protocols expose public contribution paths, while sponsors, editors, maintainers, councils, or membership rules restrict later decision stages. Public co-participation often concentrates, and governance arrangements are associated with different deliberative priorities. Governance Innovation Conversion Effectiveness (GICE) measures institutional conversion at one observable endpoint: the yield and timing of eligible proposals reaching repository merge. This framework connects agentic AI to institutional design, Internet governance, organizational economics, decentralized governance, and computational social science, while providing a framework for designing more accountable and resilient agent infrastructures.