New Delhi, Jan. 3 -- Heading to a mentor's funeral in Greece in August 2001, Tim Berners-Lee found himself and a colleague flying right over the Parthenon, "the two of us peering out of the window to the Agora steps where Socrates conducted his dialogues." Berners-Lee, the founder of the world wide web, and his fellow traveller Jean-Francois Abramatic, then chairman of the not-for-profit consortium that in effect managed the world wide web in the late 1990s, turned philosophical.

Berners-Lee wondered if we might face another dark age or if the world had reached a point "where civilisation and liberal democracy are locked in?" Abramatic confidently said that liberal democracy was "so strong and growing in concert with technology" that the...