W3C: 

The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) is an international group of several hundred Internet industry executives, founded in 1994 by Internet pioneer Tim Berners-Lee.

W3C establishes open standards for the Internet to keep it from developing in different directions. Examples of this are the http, html, XML, and PICS standards already in use. Additional protocols are P3P and RDF (see above for their definitions).

W3C is jointly hosted by Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Laboratory for Computer Science in the United States, by INRIA (Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique) in France, and by Keio University in Japan