The World Wide Web Consortium is the international standards body for the web, founded by Tim Berners-Lee in 1994. The W3C develops the technical specifications — HTML, CSS, WebAssembly, and hundreds of others — that define what "the web" means in practice. Its consensus process, which involves browser vendors, content companies, civil society groups, and academic institutions, is supposed to balance competing interests in setting open standards.
The W3C's approval of the Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) standard in 2017 was a watershed moment for Doctorow and a rupture in web governance. EME is a DRM standard that allows streaming services to encrypt video in ways that prevent users from copying it — and, critics argued, prevents interoperability and independent browser development. Doctorow was among the most vocal critics of EME's inclusion in W3C standards, arguing that it violated the organization's founding commitment to an open, accessible web.
The controversy illustrates the platform-decay-cycle at the institutional level: a standards body captured by large commercial interests ends up encoding digital-rights-management-critique into the web's foundations, foreclosing adversarial-interoperability and competitive-compatibility for future developers. The electronic-frontier-foundation resigned from the W3C over EME, citing the lack of adequate protections for security researchers who would inevitably have to circumvent DRM to find vulnerabilities.
This episode features prominently in Doctorow's arguments about why interoperability-mandates cannot rely on voluntary standards bodies and require legal teeth instead.