W3C

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the standards organization founded by Tim Berners-Lee in 1994 to steward the technical specifications of the World Wide Web, including HTML, CSS, and HTTP. It operates as a membership consortium of corporations, universities, and government agencies, and its standards are technically voluntary though practically binding due to browser vendor participation. The W3C's governance model — in which standards emerge from working groups and consensus processes — exemplifies the tension between open participation and corporate capture: the same browser vendors who implement the standards dominate the committees that define them. The rise of the WHATWG as a competing standards body in 2004 was not a rebellion against the W3C's authority but an admission that the web was evolving faster than consensus could track.