In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web to open the internet to the masses. His life-changing invention of HTTP and URLs paved the way for the massive network of data we interact with ...

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.

“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 ...