ICE was initially authored by a small, group known as the AdHoc ICE Authoring Group or the ICE AG. The ICE AG was kept purposely small to facilitate the fast-track development of this standard. Members of the group included Vignette Corporation, Tribune Media Services, Adobe, National Semi-conductor, CNET, Sun Microsystems, Inc. and, News Internet Services.

The companies that developed ICE were evenly split between software vendors and users of technology. This means that it has some real user requirements. National Semiconductor stressed how important information is both in the sales cycle as well as to support the product. National Semiconductor looked forward to scaling and personalization the current ICE-based catalog process. CNET was both an aggregator and exporter of content. CNET looked to ICE to make this process both standard and easy. News Internet Services believed ICE would reduce engineering resources spent on developing syndication technology.

ICE 1.0 was published in 1998 and posted as a Note to the World Wide Web Consortium in 1999.  See at http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-ice.

In 2002, the ICE Authoring Group  identified 15 draft requirements for a major revision of the Specification that identify the lessons learned during the past four years of ICE implementations, coupled with continued innovations in the XML community, to review and refine ICE to meet the growing demands of business. The goal was to express the ICE content syndication standard as a Web Service. This first major revision of the ICE Specification focused on compatibility with the three major Web Services Standards:  WSDL, SOAP and UDDI.

In December 2003, the ICE Authoring Group posted the final draft of the new ICE 2.0 for public comment.  The final release of the specification as a set of six documents, was posted August 1, 2004.