There's nothing quite so conservative these days as a worried liberal

That's liberal in the American sense you understand, a wet left winger. As with Will Hutton here:

The internet celebrated its 28th birthday a fortnight ago. It’s an invention that ranks alongside the wheel, immunisation against disease and the internal combustion engine as a transformer of human existence. As an open information digital connector, it is an extraordinary force for individual liberation, embodying the very best of Enlightenment values: more information is available to more people through their mobile phones and personal computers than ever before.

The world can then follow the Enlightenment injunction to dare to know to a degree that the great philosophers, arguing for a free public realm where information and evidence could be openly marshalled and tested for human betterment, could never have foreseen.

Over the last 18 months, it has become obvious that the internet is the most serious threat to the Enlightenment values it purports to represent.

The Enlightenment was about more people gaining more access to more information in their own language. The King James Bible, as with Wycliff before and the equivalents in other languages of translations into the vernacular, were really the start of it all. And now that very same process, where more people gain more access to more information in their own language is a threat? 

Well, yes, it is actually, but it's a threat to a certain set up, not to the idea itself:

Worse, the advertising draining from newspapers is reaching such a scale that the viability of a free press is under threat. Online newspapers can charge subscribers, but still need advertising to support journalism and the expensive edifice of complying with publishing law. At the very least, as upholders of true news, they should be competing with Google and Facebook on equal terms.

The world of cushy berths is threatened, berths where four digit weekly pay checks are distributed for an hour's work on a column. That's the actual complaint and that's the threat, not to the Enlightenment or its values but to the people who have done very well out of he current structure. Thus the most conservative insistence that nothing must change.