NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Wednesday, August 21, 2013

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants to bring Internet access to everyone. Late Tuesday he announced the launch of Internet.org, an initiative to bring Internet access to the two-thirds of the world’s population that can’t get online.

Only 2.7 billion people have Internet access, with Internet adoption growing by less than 9 percent annually.

The founding members of Internet.org are Facebook, Ericsson, MediaTek, Nokia, Opera, Qualcomm and Samsung. Their goals? Efficient use of data, making Internet access affordable, and helping businesses create new business models and services that will drive Internet access.

Some potential projects of Internet.org include development of lower-cost, higher-quality smartphones that could help deploy Internet access in underserved areas, data compression tools and data caching systems as well as localization of mobile devices.