[mbutterick]

Hi, this is Matthew Butterick. I wrote "The Bomb in the Garden."

Yes, there is something you can do to support me — well, forget me, I'm not important. But the question I'm interested in is important. So if more people started thinking about the question, started having conversations about the question, tried to answer the question (on HN or elsewhere), that would be great.

The question is this:

Based on its 20-year track record, is the W3C equipped to keep the web competitive over the coming 5, 10, and 20 years? (And if not, what should replace the W3C?)

The issue of "20-year track record" is important. The W3C has been around long enough that it can be — it must be — evaluated by its performance, not by its promises.

Furthermore, the notion of "competitive" is increasingly important, as alternative media platforms make inroads against the web (as I discuss in the article)

Bottom line, I want the web to win. And it's not winning. It's falling behind. But we need to be willing to ask the hard questions about how it got here. We need to hold the W3C's feet to the fire. We need to agitate for the web we want. Because in the end, it's not the W3C's web, it's not Google's web, it's OUR web. And if we don't like the web we end up with, we'll have no one to blame but ourselves.