alt Hacker NewsLiterally the WHATWG founders wanted to focus on web applications, which they said web authors were asking for, and they got voted down.
Google was not involved in the founding of WHATWG, though certainly the WHATWG vision was better aligned with Google than with what the W3C was doing.
They only paid the salary of its chief editor (Ian Hickson) for a significant amount of time...
But that's not very relevant actually. The WHATWG is more like a private arbitrator, not like a court or parliament.
Their mission is to document browser features and coordinate them in such a way that implementation between browsers doesn't diverge too much. It's NOT their mission to decide which features will or will not be implemented or even to design new features. That's left to the browser vendors.
And the most powerful browser vendor is Google.