The World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, was founded in 1994. Tim Berners-Lee created it to coordinate the Web’s rapid development and encourage shared, open technical standards.
By the mid-1990s, different companies and research institutions were building browsers, servers and websites at speed. Without coordination, competing implementations could have made the Web fragmented and difficult to use. W3C provided a forum where members could develop recommendations for technologies such as HTML, CSS and web accessibility.
The consortium was launched at MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science in October 1994, in collaboration with CERN and with support from DARPA and the European Commission. Its structure was international from the beginning: Inria became the first European host in 1995, followed by Keio University in Japan in 1996.
W3C did not invent the Web; Berners-Lee had proposed and built it at CERN beginning in 1989. The consortium’s role was stewardship—helping the Web remain interoperable, royalty-free and usable across different companies, operating systems and devices.