"Wave is designed to operate as a decentralized communication network. Individuals and organizations will run their own Wave-compatible servers which will all interoperate through a federated messaging protocol. Although Google has developed the underlying technology, the company intends to open it up entirely to the community and make it a vendor-neutral standard. There will be multiple competing implementations, much like there are today for e-mail services, and it will be possible to use and operate independent Wave services without having to rely on Google."