zlacker

The working group is definitely quite corporate-driven – just look at who's most active in it! – and has made some bad decisions in the past (my favorite example being [1], which effectively either breaks the hardware authenticator experience for passkeys or helps Yubico sell more/higher capacity Yubikeys, depending on how you look at it).

But I agree that one thing you can't accuse them of is not operating in the open. While I don't agree with some of their decisions, discussing feedback in Github issues as well as on public mailing lists is probably as transparent as it gets.

[1] https://github.com/w3c/webauthn/issues/1822

>>lxgr+(OP)
... arms in a wide shrug ... well, yes, and ... it was always like this, no?

DARPA was defense money, Xerox PARC was corporate money. The one big success I can quickly name that's "pure" is the web from CERN. (Okay I looked up, SMTP, RFC 821 from 1982 submitted by Jon Postel from ISI USC. But emails with the familiar @ were invented at a for-profit company by Ray Tomlinson more than a decade earlier.)

I'm not saying we should just slump into apathy, I'm just trying to point out that many mostly good things came from big corps. (And the usual problem is that they still hold the keys to the kingdom. For example see how hard it is to send mail to MS hosted email inboxes. And of course they hide behind "oh our users choose this aggressive level of filtering".)