Ever since working in Nokia, I'm highly skeptical of standardization bodies being able to solve technical problems in a satisfying way. Companies use standardization bodies to play poker with their competitors. It's a complex game that involves patents, getting your pet proprietary features rubber stamped, and making sure you retain some inherent advantage over competitors. Above all, it's a very slow process. I saw Nokia play this game .. and lose.

Apple and Google ignored several of the established standards to basically raise the bar and sideline the entrenched incumbents bickering over arcane details in those standards. Apple ignored MMS and most of other 3G features with the original iphone and it never became a feature any Apple user cared about. Google ignored things like J2ME. Other things they ignored were most of what operators were "standardizing" to prevent the internet being usable on their networks. All of that got shelved once Apple and Google allowed you to just use browser and internet based alternatives.

Operators got demoted to routing IP packets around; the very thing they were trying to prevent by standardizing things that they controlled. The whole legacy business of charging per call minute or text message is completely dead at this point. They were trying to standardize that so they could keep the gravy train going. It failed.

Not all standards are that bad of course. But resolving complex technical issues through a standardization body results in complicated solutions that are years/decades late to market and aren't necessarily very optimal.

Standard bodies are very good at standardizing and normalizing the status quo though. Build something, get people to use it, and then standardize it so people can be assured about interoperability. This typically results in pragmatic standardized solutions. The more implementations are out there, the better. A lot of standards are so-called industry standards where a company or group of companies agree on doing things a certain way and then formalize their commitment by providing a specification.

HTML5 is a good example. XHTML 1.0 is what happens when standards bodies go wrong. HTML5 happened because the W3C lost the plot at some point and got sucked down a path of writing/dictating increasingly less relevant standards in such a way that browser builders took it upon themselves to write a proper standard for what browsers were actually doing. Nokia was all over the W3C (I knew some people involved in various working groups). Since HTML5 happened then, things run a lot smoother on the web.

WASM came out of that community and was moving relatively quickly because of that. From cute demos to being a not so visible but increasingly core part of the modern web in the space of a few years. Garbage collection to enable deep integration with e.g. the DOM in browsers, sockets to be able to do IO, threads to make better use of modern hardware are all things that are pretty fundamental to get right and they are happening. WASM isn't being standardized in a void. There are experimental flags in Chrome that you can turn on right now to explore the progress with these features. Firefox is not far behind.

However, there is a worrying and growing amount of companies that are asserting themselves in the ByteCode Alliance. Too many conflicts of interest and political issues. Decision making must be getting quite hard.

The way out is to move ahead with stuff that works and ask for forgiveness rather then permission. If enough people use it and it works, it will get standardized. Standardization comes at the end of that process, not at the beginning.