In October 1994 the inventor of the web, Tim Berners-Lee, founded the World Wide Web Consortium, known as the W3C, to guide the technical development of the World Wide Web. The W3C’s own facts page records the event: “In October 1994, Sir Tim Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).”
The consortium was established at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in its Laboratory for Computer Science, in collaboration with CERN, where the web had been invented, and with support from DARPA and the European Commission. The goal was to keep the young web open and interoperable by developing shared standards rather than letting it fragment into incompatible, vendor-controlled versions.
Over the following years the W3C became the central home for many of the web’s foundational specifications, including standards for HTML, CSS, and other core technologies. Its arrival marked the moment the web shifted from a single researcher’s project into a formally stewarded public platform.
The W3C did not have a monopoly on web standards forever. In 2004 a separate group, WHATWG, formed to push HTML forward in a different way, and the two bodies later collaborated on the modern HTML standard. But the founding of the W3C in 1994 set the precedent that the web would be governed by open standards.