W3C to become a public-interest non-profit organization | W3C Media Advisory | 28 June 2022

"The World Wide Web Consortium is set to pursue 501(c)(3) non-profit status. The launch as a new legal entity in January 2023 preserves the core mission of the Consortium to shepherd the web by developing open standards with contributions from W3C Members, staff, and the international community. "We designed the W3C legal entity in a way that keeps our core unchanged," said Dr. Jeff Jaffe, W3C CEO. "Our values-driven work remains anchored in the royalty-free W3C Patent Policy, and the W3C Process Document where we enshrined dedication to security, privacy, internationalization and web accessibility. W3C and its Members will continue to play a fundamental role in making the web work for billions of people." Understanding the historical Hosted model When Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee founded W3C in 1994, he created a community of peers. Web technologies were already moving so quickly that it was critical to assemble a single organization to coordinate web standards. Tim accepted the offer from MIT, who had experience with consortia, to host W3C. He required from the start that W3C have a global footprint. Within a few years, MIT (USA), Keio University (Japan), Inria (France, transitioning to ERCIM in 2003) completed agreements to provide W3C legal hosting. We added in 2013 Beihang University (China). The four partnered administratively in a Hosted model to manage W3C Members and provide employment of the global W3C staff working under the direction of W3C’s management. At the operational level, which is not changing, W3C Members are bound together for our technical work, united around the W3C’s mission to lead the web to its full potential by creating open standards that ensure that the web remains open, accessible, internationalized, secure, and interoperable for everyone around the globe....By incorporating, W3C is replacing its original Hosted model and boosting its crucial web standards work..."