[neilv]

The W3C staff I've talked with seem very decent, in a public-interest kind of way. Though there's always been a tendency of Web standards (de facto, and de jure) to serve the interests of dotcoms, a bit like an industry consortium.

I think that industry-savvy people used to be mainly concerned with avoiding abusive monopolies, since we had examples of that. What I think many early Internet and Web people (who tended to be altruistic) didn't anticipate was the current culture of pervasive sneaky privacy abuses and often questionable engineering.