As someone from W3C I feel that there is an unfortunate distortion in how Cory is representing the situation.
He writes: “I worked with the Electronic Frontier Foundation to propose a W3C policy that would have made its members promise not to use the DMCA to take down legal technologies, and the W3C’s director completely rejected that proposal.”
This is not the case. A series of proposals were made but the W3C Advisory Committee didn’t reach consensus on any of them. That Cory’s proposal was not accepted whole cloth does not mean the importance of the issue was rejected. This is how standards bodies work - proposals are made, they are discussed and sometimes consensus is reached and sometimes not. The W3C has many members and many voices are heard. However, that doesn’t mean the issue was deemed unimportant or rejected.
See the reiteration of the W3C’s support of security work and notice of the new Technology and Policy IG in the blog post from 5 April about allowing the EME WG to progress:
"The W3C is currently setting up a Technology and Policy Interest Group to keep looking at those issues and we intend to bring challenges related to these laws to this Group."
see: https://www.w3.org/blog/2016/04/html-media-extensions-to-continue-work/
