This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers.Privacy has become a key differentiator for browsers trying to challenge Google Chrome's market dominance, such as Apple's Safari, Mozilla's Firefox and Brave.
But unlike the browser war days of the 1990s, smaller browsers like Safari and Brave are successfully teaming up to push back against web features pushed by Google that they see as highly invasive. Those critics also say Chrome's dominance as a browser has the consequence of giving the search giant an outsize say in determining how the web is fundamentally shaped.
The W3C's member organizations are a diverse mix of tech firms, academic institutions, and publishers among others. One of these members might propose a new web standard, and put it up for informal discussion through one of the W3C's "interest groups." The process of deciding on the standard then moves up a level to the W3C's "working groups", and then to review and a final vote.
"Google is by far the largest player on standards bodies and so Google directly or indirectly has a large say in defining what the neutral web is," said one source, also a W3C member. Here's a widely cited example among Google's critics: Google has been championing a standard for the web called the Bluetooth Web API.