Tim Berners-Lee may have the smallest fame-to-impact ratio of anyone living. Strangers hardly ever recognize his face; on “Jeopardy!,” his name usually goes for at least sixteen hundred dollars.

In the age of social media, the online landscape is more challenging than ever for civil society. It’s a far cry from what the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, intended to create. He ...

“For the web to have everything on it, everyone had to be able to use it, and want to do so. This was already asking a lot. I couldn’t also ask that they pay for each search or upload they made. In ...