It was founded by Tim Berners-Lee. The consortium is made up of member organizations which maintain full-time staff for the purpose of working together in the development of standards for the internet.

In 2012 and 2013, the W3C started considering adding DRM-specific Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) to HTML5, which was criticised as being against the openness, interoperability, and vendor neutrality that distinguished websites built using only W3C standards (example: https://www.theblogstarter.com) from those requiring proprietary plug-ins like Flash.