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ICANN!

https://www.w3.org/Policy.html

The part that may have confused-

The basic WWW code is in the Public Domain, the rest is covered by the conditions of distribution . In practice the interpretation of this in the case of the W3 project is that the programs are freely available to academic bodies of CERN member states and to the world-wide High-Energy Physics community. To commercial organizations who are not reselling it, but are using it to participate in global information exchange, the charge is generally waived in order to cut administrative costs. Code is of course shared freely with all collaborators. Commercial organizations wishing to sell software based on W3 code should contact CERN.

So copyrighted code that could be licenced from CERN.. Which I think related to using CERN-server/client programs. But-

The definition of protocols such as HTTP and data formats such as HTML are in the public domain and may be freely used by anyone.

So software developed to use the base format/protocols was free to use and include in commercial alternatives, ie Apache, providing they didn't incorporate CERN's code. Any enforcement would then have been under normal copyright mechanisms. But the main reason HTML became a thing was the fact that like most other Internet protocols, it was 'open source' vs other markup & protocols around at the time.