I think you completely have missed the historic charter and nature of the W3C. It always was a pay to play organization, where they highly encouraged corporat

I think you completely have missed the historic charter and nature of the W3C. It always was a pay to play organization, where they highly encouraged corporate or institutional members and dissuaded individual membership. It's very, very different from (say) the IETF. The intent was to recognize the Web world for what it was: filled with competitive interests with no interest on the integrity of the architecture that had been created. The W3C was a way to bring their engineers together to save the Web from the various marketing departments that were escalating an arms race of proprietary browser features. It was to create a legitimate channel to drive agreements across competitors without antitrust concerns. It didn't entirely succeed, only somewhat. But this decision is consistent with its history. The W3C is only a reflection of its members.