That is not how it has always been. For most of its history W3C was run by scientists, universities and government agencies. Google/Apple/Microsoft came much later.
Umm, I was a member of the CSS, XHTML, and XForms committees back in 2001, and most of my fellow committee members were from big corps, including me, representing Oracle on the committee.
Perhaps you're thinking of the IETF. The W3C was always more corporate than the IETF, but even the IETF had lots of corps, it just had more university reps than the W3C did.
As a Consortium the W3C's members are mostly corporations. For much of its existence individuals couldn't even join, now they can but it's expensive. If Bob loses his job at Big Corp, Big Corp are the W3C member, Big Corp gets to send Bob's replacement to the W3C meetings to represent Big Corp interests. Big Corp votes on W3C work, albeit via Bob or his successor, but Bob doesn't have a vote unless Bob joins individually at his own expense he has no voice.
The IETF doesn't have members. IETF participation is an individual activity for people. Your employer can (and many do) pay you to participate, but they're not the ones participating, you are. The IETF doesn't vote on anything, it doesn't have members so a vote wouldn't mean anything, it is looking only for a "rough consensus".
I mean, it's true, but it's kind of a semantic difference. I also served on the IETF Lemonade IMAP group on behalf of Oracle, and although there's no implicit vote structure, one or two committee members can pretty much torpedo stuff, although my experience was more positive, because even though they torpedo stuff, people tend to be more consensus/cooperative driven, and look for common ground solution.
So for example, we were seeking to make extensions to IMAP that gave standards based email something competitive with the Blackberry experience. Some of the proposals specified protocol proposals specified yet another tunneled protocol for real time notifications over 25 or 143, but I objected that deploying this widescale was more difficult due to firewalls, I counter proposed a HTTP based solution which also was shot down. But the group did consider my concerns over deployment, and shipped a BCP document to encourage network admins to be prepared for Lemonade specs: https://tools.ietf.org/search/bcp143#section-6.1
That said, this whole thread really bothers me, because people's attitude isn't "well, Apple should counter propose improvements to achieve use cases, but with better battery/security/privacy", but just "Google bad, don't work with them, essentially boycott the W3C/WHATWG and freeze the web in place. Oh, and let's keep the web like it was 1998."
The Web has changed a lot, people's requirements and use cases have changed a lot. Just take e-commerce or passwords. We all know that sending your credit cards or password credentials to Web sites is bad for security. So login and payments need to be solved and THIS REQUIRES NEW STANDARDS.
You simply can't say "HTML4 was good enough. " because HTML4 meant cookie hacks, HTML4 meant storing your credit cards and password credentials on the server. If Apple cared about these things, they'd make sure to work with Google, and Mozilla, and Microsoft to ensure standardized, secure, private payments and logins were widely deployed and implemented for example.
I really tire of this tribalist fanboyism.
If you think Google is evil or shouldn't control the web, the solution isn't to boycott the standards committees, or to cheerlead a stagnant unchanging web platform (an unchanging platform is effectively a dead platform in the face of changing hardware and user demands), it's to get involved. And therefore, the proper court of action is to demand Apple fully fund their Safari team. It's obvious they's skimping on them, as the accumulated bugs alone are not a philosophical choice, but one based on resources.
The internet (Arpanet) was invented by the US Government and Universities that worked with them. The www (Tim Bernes-Lee) was created at CERN (scientists) and won out things to other things like Gopher and BBSes.
The telcos almost won the wires for voice instead of IP based systems. It’s been a mix of Government, Scientists, University Academics, and corporations since the late 80s/early 90s if not sooner.
AOL got the masses on the web and things like Prodigy existed before them. AOL is more akin to Facebook nowadays.
Follow the money. For most of its history you had to pay to participate. Yes, their work products and discussions were fully in the open, but you had to be invited to participate if you weren’t employed by a funding enterprise.
