Oh dear. This feels like the hobby horse of someone whose just realised that different browser markup exists and decided to arbitrarily blame the W3C.

This article starts out in the right place - which is a good thing. There are a large number of websites shown which aren't the best designed in the world.

Unfortunately, it then goes dramatically of track.

"Because we’re going to have to do it cheaply, with the advertising pushing costs down. This was supposed to be one of the virtues, I think, of web standards."

No, the point of web standards was never to make web design cheap because there is less money to pay for it. That's never been the objective. The point of web standards are to make it possible to write a single article which can be viewed in a similar way on a number of different devices.

"And the misery exists because of the W3C—the World Wide Web Consortium. That’s the organization that supervises web standards." - No, that's incorrect. Web standards aren't poorly enforced because of the W3C - they are poorly enforced because browser makers extend standards in different ways, and because some browser makers underinvested in maintaing compatibility with the rest of the web (e.g. IE between 1999 and 2008).

"... And way too lenient in enforcing them." - The W3C has NO power to make any browser manufacturer enforce web standards. None. Zilch. Nothing. They can say whether a implementation is standards compliant, but historically that's had no effect on either the adoption rate of the browser, or whether the browser manufacturer will do anything.

"No. Because PDF is an ISO standard. " - No that's not why. It being a standard doesn't magically make everyone suddenly exactly implement the standard. PDFs work across platform because there's a single reference implementation (Adobe Reader) which all other readers must copy. Also, the PDF standard (as far as the functionality being implemented identically) has been unchanged for the past 15 years. A PDF written today will almost certainly run on a PDF reader written 10 years ago. There's nowhere near the same pace of innovation - a browser of 15 years ago is unlikely to be able to perform AJAX, let alone <video>, <audio> or WebGL.

"I love that, Tim. Did you say that 15 years ago? No. Well, did you say it five years ago? No. When did you say it? You said it three months ago?" - Aside from the fact that it's way easier to pay for things on the web than at pretty much any point in recent history (Compare completing an arbitary online transaction, which might take order of 2 minutes, without a preset price, which may reoccur, to anything older than about five years), Tim Berners Lee is hardly the only person allowed to innovate on the web. There are a dozen companies pioneering online payment protocols. Mozilla are currently looking at WebPayment for Boot 2 Gecko - https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI/WebPayment

"And if you worry, as some do, that the alternative to no W3C is chaos, or if you worry that the alternative is a web ruled by Google and Microsoft and Apple—I don’t think so." - Yes, it was. Please do yourself a favour and look up the WHATWG which took HTML 5 away from the W3C due to disagreements on process. It was pretty much a group of Mozilla, Google, Microsoft, Apple and Opera deciding what happened. Disband the W3C (through some might act of God) and that's what they'll go back to. To be fair, it's still those five, just under some other grouping

"The W3C could refuse to renew the membership of organizations that took actions contrary to the spirit of web standards, including repeatedly failing to implement them. If the W3C made participation in the consortium contingent on timely implementation, members would either comply or quit." - You don't seem to get that the W3C needs organizations such as Microsoft, Apple, etc a hell of a lot more than they need it. If the W3C rejected them because they happen to have different implementations of gradients, they would reform the WHATWG, and the W3C would have $n less to promote web standards. The W3C does what the member organizations vote that it should do, or they leave. It's literally that simple. Hence the sitatuation with DRM and Do Not Track.