Setting the standards
The general consensus is that the IT industry is not regulated and should not be regulated, but governed by standards its customers demand. Organisations such as the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) create guidelines and frameworks for the global ICT sector, but these benchmarks are suggestions and companies are not forced by any regulation to comply with them.
By Kelly Gregor
Published in IT Brief July 2009
The W3C is run by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, who together with other influential IT professionals created the organisation to develop protocols that would ensure the long-term growth of the web. W3C says the social value of the web is that it enables human communication, commerce and opportunities to share knowledge. One of the W3C's primary goals is to make these benefits available to all people "whatever their hardware, software, network, infrastructure, native language, culture, geographical location of physical or mental ability".
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