The Web has grown so large that the number of Web pages rivals the number of neurons in a human brain, Berners-Lee said. And the Web must be analyzed, just as we analyze the brain.

"To a certain extent, we have a duty about the Web which is greater than our duty about the brain, because with the brain we just analyze it," he said. "But with the Web, we actually get to engineer it. We can change it."

Negroponte used his time on stage to reflect on both the MIT Media Lab and the One Laptop Per Child project, which has supplied millions of cheap computers to children in some of the world's poorest countries. Negroponte's project could be seen as extending the idea that the Web is a basic human right with concrete action, putting laptops in the hands of children who otherwise would not get them.

Negroponte showed pictures of children around the world using the laptops, including one in Peru who was teaching his grandparents how to read and write. Each laptop, he noted, came loaded with 100 books. When 100 laptops were shipped to a village, that meant 10,000 books were coming with them.

The free market alone would not have been a great enough force to accomplish this, he said.