What does this equation mean?

That last detail is the fact worth sitting with, because it is a fact rather than an inference: a protocol adopted natively by its author’s competitors, while still under that author’s sole governance, is an arrangement institutional participants have reasons beyond altruism to want changed. A shared specification only pays off once enough independent parties are using the same one — a dynamic economists have long formalized informally as a network externality, where a network’s value scales not with the number of participants but with the number of pairs of participants able to interoperate: $V(n) \propto n(n-1)$. This is a coarse model — it treats every pair as equally valuable and compatibility as all-or-nothing, both of which are false in practice, where a server built to one draft of the spec may or may not interoperate cleanly with a client built to another. But even in its coarse form it explains why a widely adopted specification under single-vendor control becomes a standing liability for every other adopter, and why transferring it to neutral governance is a rational response to exactly the adoption numbers Anthropic itself disclosed — not a symbolic gesture layered on top of them.