Which organization develops the HTTP standard?

Which organization develops the HTTP standard? The answer is the IETF.

The Internet Engineering Task Force, or IETF, develops and publishes the modern HTTP standard through its HTTP Working Group and a series of technical RFCs. HTTP is the application-layer protocol that lets clients such as web browsers request resources and servers return responses.

Tim Berners-Lee and colleagues at CERN created the original web technologies, including early HTTP, in the early 1990s. The IETF later standardized and developed successive versions, including HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, and HTTP/3. The specifications define request methods, status codes, headers, caching behavior, and other interoperability rules.

The World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, is a common source of confusion because it participated in early HTTP standardization efforts alongside the IETF. However, responsibility for HTTP specifications later moved to the IETF, making IETF the canonical answer for the organization developing the current standard.