You can ask someone to stop doing something legal. I'd hate to live in the sort of world where you can't. HN moderators would send the police after you to seize your laptop if you make bad comments. The only way to get your roommate to stop eating your plums would be to charge them with larceny. Every relationship would end with a restraining order, or it wouldn't be over. Failing to turn in a homework assignment on time would lead to a court date. Buying more than ten items in the express lane would get you arrested for fraud.

If that isn't the world you want to live in, let's get rid of this idea that just because I have no interest in the government stopping you from doing a thing by threatening violence (and that's all a license is - a statement that the following activities are not copyright infringement), I'm totally fine with you doing the thing.

Sure but they are using the copyright to insist on attribution, which undermines the argument that they are simply against using the law. If they really didn't care they'd use CC0.

And in the quoted statement they are not saying the W3C should improve their process for forking WHATWG's work. They are saying the W3C shouldn't fork their work at all. So despite their specifically chosen license (with easy to understand layman's summary) are WHATWG against all forking? Or are they simply against the W3C?

Most of your points are addressed by Ian in an old email:

"In the case of the WHATWG specifications, the licenses allow broad re-use, so that implementors can copy-and-paste text into their comment blocks, so that tutorial writers can copy-and-paste text into their documentation, so that experiments we haven't considered can spring up without inhibition, and so that, if the WHATWG stops being a good steward (like the W3C stopped being a good steward in the early 2000s), the next group of spec editors doesn't have to start from scratch." (http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2014Apr/0034...)

Yes, they do in fact want to use state violence to insist on attribution. They don't want to use state violence to insist on the W3C going away, but they still want the W3C to go away. That seems reasonable to me.

This change to requiring attribution is actually fairly recent, and was made with some reluctance on the part of us editors, despite eventually agreeing it was the best path forward. See https://blog.whatwg.org/copyright-license-change

Thanks for the link! It's great to be able to read the reasoning behind decisions.

There is a typo in the third paragraph, first sentence, FYI. "Are not" is repeated.

  For example, there are derivative specifications ("forks") that are not are not prominently identified as copies of WHATWG standards

Typo fixed, thanks!

To quote the W3C itself: "Forking a specification imposes high costs, and is therefore not recommended" (http://www.w3.org/2013/09/html-faq)

And Hixie/the WHATWG: "It is critically important (not just here but in life at large) to understand the difference between something being _a right_, and something being _right_." (http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2014Apr/0034...)

I think the point here is not about the legality but more about the ethics of doing so, in this case.

It just amuses me that they're effectively saying that anyone can fork this for any reason... except for the W3C.

No, they are saying anyone is allowed to fork this for any reason, but we’d really prefer the W3C didn't fork this for the reason that they are, because it's confusing and counterproductive.

Whether someone should be permitted to do something is a different issue than whether they should actually do it.

It is debatable if it is unethical given the license but it is definitely a disservice for the community.