Domination by large organizations

The W3C has been criticized as being dominated by larger organizations and thus writing standards that represent their interests. For example, a member of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (WCAG WG)^[13] complained that:

The process is stacked in favour of multinationals with expense accounts who can afford to talk on the phone for two hours a week and jet to world capitals for meetings.^[14]

A similar criticism, responding to large software company complaints about the slow pace of W3C's formulation of XML/web services standards, appeared in Cnet's news.com in 2002:

"I'm not convinced that developers are too bothered," said Edd Dumbill, editor of XML.com, who has worked as a software developer on Web services. "I think developers are being poorly served by the fact that the big companies have dominated the work of the W3C over the last year. The W3C does more or less what its members tell it to. So I don't have a huge amount of sympathy for the complaints of large companies."^[15]

Membership

The domain w3.org attracted at least 11 million visitors annually by 2008 according to a Compete.com study.^[8]

The Consortium is governed by its membership, which in August 2009 comprised 322 organizations. The list of members is available to the public.^[1] Members include businesses, nonprofit organizations, universities, governmental entities, and individuals.^[9]

Membership requirements are transparent except for one requirement. An application for membership must be reviewed and approved by W3C. Many guidelines and requirements are stated in detail, but there is no final guideline about the process or standards by which membership might be finally approved or denied.^[10]

The cost of membership is given on a sliding scale, depending on the character of the organization applying and the country in which it is located.^[11] Countries are categorized by the World Bank's most recent grouping by GNI ("Gross National Income") per capita.^[12]