W3C announces antitrust guidance document

The W3C supports a community including more than 400 member organizations in developing Open Standards for the Open Web Platform. Many of these organizations are competitors in highly competitive markets. Others are researchers, consumers, and regulators. They come together in W3C Working Groups and Interest Groups to develop standards for interoperability: shared languages, formats, and APIs.

The W3C Process supports this work through a framework of consensus-based decision-making, a focus on technical requirements and interop testing, and our Royalty-Free Patent Policy.

As we're joined by more participants from a wider range of industries, including Payments, Automotive, and Publishing, we wanted to highlight the role Process plays in helping competitors to work together fairly. Accordingly, we published a brief antitrust guidance document reflecting our existing practices.

Antitrust and competition law protect the public by requiring market competitors to act fairly in the marketplace. Open standards are pro-competitive and pro-user because an open, interoperable platform increases the opportunities for innovative competition in and on the Web. We continue to invite wide participation in the work of constructing these standards.