[throwaway892238]

Or both.

The story of Ethernet is kinda interesting. Invented in 1974 at Xerox PARC, the inventors started a new company called 3COM in 1979, and worked with IEEE, as well as DEC, Intel, and Xerox (called the DIX - I'm not kidding) for all of them to join forces and support one new standard. IEEE project to standardize it started in 1980, and formal standard publication happened in 1983. International (ISO) publication was in 1989.

Business decides what becomes the new standard, because the biggest businesses are whom everyone is dependent upon. So the biggest companies do set the new standards. Google has been doing that for years, using its search market dominance and custom browser as carte blanche to shape the web as it sees fit. CloudFlare has come in the back door, and doesn't have anywhere near the same influence, but does control a powerful market segment that is growing. Add in the cloud providers, and that's most of whom actually matter in terms of where the web goes.

Where the "internet" (sans web) goes is, I think, more up to the operating systems and ISPs. But since everything has been pushed into the web to avoid the manipulation of the "middle boxes" (ISPs and corporate networks), the end result is the people who control 'the web' (Google and CloudFlare) can now dictate terms.