I was heavily involved in the IETF and the W3C back in the late 1990s, when "the web" was new (and when the "W3C" was new). Back then, there was a big debate about the wisdom of "Postel's law", which I strongly suspect was a big part of the rationale for the W3C forking from the IETF. After the failure of HTML 2.0 (published by the IETF) to be published quickly enough to stop the creation of de facto standards by Netscape and Microsoft, since HTML 2.0 doesn't have very many features in it, but Netscape's and Microsoft's browsers had many more features. The W3C went down the path of insisting that compliant implementations should "halt and catch fire" (so to speak) when they published the XML specification in 1997. The "XHTML" experiment proved that organizations don't have that much authority, and that anyone who purports to be a "compliance cop" from one of those organizations is likely to get a wedgie and may get their head dunked in a toilet. :-)
The IETF and the W3C both still exist, and still frequently publish specifications (for free on their respective websites). People even still read the specifications and sometimes they publish software that more-or-less complies with the specs. Both organizations have ways of asserting their moral authority as organizations. These are best exemplified by the "Considered harmful" documents that the IETF frequently published in the late 1990s (e.g. "Character Set Considered Harmful" published by Dan Connolly in 1995)