W3C no longer leads the web

This went on below the radar of most tech news agencies.

The big tech working group WHATWG (Apple, Google, Mozilla and Microsoft) recently scored a major victory against their opponent W3C, as they were able to get a memorandum of understanding signed where W3C gives up on maintaining HTML and DOM standards.

Of course this move is praised by big tech friendly voices as "giving full control back to browser vendors" (ZDNET). But, rocking back my chair and trying to look at it from a wider perspective, this is nothing short of a takeover by big tech. Think about it this way: A CONSORTIUM hands over the reigns to a renegade WORKING GROUP? A working group that has little to no respect for the W3C? Reminder: all the members of WHATWG are still members of W3C. This is an (un-)friendly takeover of W3C.

Of course it could only develop this way due to the lack of leadership by W3C. And of course this was criticized all the time. But despite the voices that now raise the "peace finally" sound, I predict that this will not end well. There was nothing wrong with the previous practice of publishing the standards *after* the implementation by big tech. This is a very common practice in other areas (for example in programming languages). It's easy to see why big tech sees standardization as just another stump-foot. Their constant push for often questionable new technologies is an easy and well exercised way to eliminate concurrence by the often more well thought open source projects.

To me, the most bitter pill is to see the entanglement of Mozilla in these working groups. It makes me re-think my usage of Firefox and Thunderbird altogether.