All power is ultimately politics, not rules. People can use politics to change the rules, which happens often through lobbyists, influence, or even force.
Powerful actors operate on the level of politics; they write the rules. The plebeians operate at the level of rules. If I'm unhappy with something a major corporation does, I can operate within the rules and complain to a regulator or take the company to court. If the corporation is unhappy then they get the rules changed, for example by having laws passed that prohibit my lawsuit, eliminate their liability, or hamstring the regulator. It also happens in smaller domains, such as among employees of a business: those skilled in politics get the internal decisions and rules made in their favor.
The exception is, broadly speaking, more common than the process described above: The issues most people deal with in their everyday lives aren't important enough to motivate political action.
Save for the fact that their life is completely shaped by politics.
I like your analysis a lot, but I don't like your conclusion. Because ultimately, humans make politics, so one can influence them. In french there's a saying : if you don't care about politics, then politics will take care of you...
There is an English template for expressing this idea; it goes "You may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you".
I don't know what originally filled the spot where I've put in "politics".
I agree with you; I meant to imply that as part of the mechanism.
Not true. See Google's NaCl and Mozilla and Microsoft's own alternatives to that. Neither went anywhere because each browser pushed in a different direction. It's only through W3C that they managed to build WebAssembly and all agree to use it.
I see this DRM thing the same way. Without W3C they may have built their own DRM solutions (and in fact, they have, years ago), but they wouldn't be compatible with each other, which means they wouldn't get too much adoption either.
Prior to the first spec being presented to the W3C, it had already been worked on by two of the biggest browser vendors.
In politics, very often, there are no strictly enforced rules, there are groups of pressures pushing in opposing directions. W3C has no way to prevent proprietary browsers for doing what they want, they just put some pressure on them. They know that going through W3C is the easiest way to agree on a standard and to provide interoperability for their users.
This is a small amount of pushing power.
EFF withdrawing is normal: that's the main item they were interested in. The question now is to see whether Mozilla will stay.