Well, in a former life I developed websites (for 17 years) and the internet was built on top of protocols and platforms. (hacked.com)
Although it will always be used to process network transactions, a lot of new projects are being built on top of this protocol to serve other functions. (links2exchange.net)
All sides of the debate acknowledge that Bitcoin will ultimately need additional scaling solutions built on top of the protocol layer, and possibly a revision of the funding structure to reward miners. (bitcoinmagazine.com)