The video begins with children hanging out on a graffiti-covered rock overlooking a smog-shrouded city. Later, it shows trains so jammed with human bodies that arms and legs stick out of the cars. There’s a wedding, street performers, a carousel. In the background, we hear John F. Kennedy’s famous speech “A Strategy of Peace.” The video fades to black and a title card appears. It could be an ad for the United Nations, an anti-war organization, or the Peace Corps. Instead, it reads, “Today, the internet isn’t accessible for two thirds of the world. Imagine a world where it connects us all. Internet.org.”
Internet.org is a new organization founded by Mark Zuckerberg, the C.E.O. of Facebook. A press release from Facebook earlier this week described Internet.org as “a global partnership with the goal of making internet access available to the next 5 billion people.”
The organization aims to get as many people on the Web as possible, particularly in developing nations. Internet adoption is growing by less than nine per cent a year, which Internet.org sees as a problem. The main obstacles to Internet adoption, as the group sees it, are that data is too expensive and is being used inefficiently, and that there aren’t enough “business models”—ways to make money—for companies to invest in access in developing areas. It plans to fix these problems by “collaborat[ing] to develop and adopt technologies that make mobile connectivity more affordable and decrease the cost of delivering data”; “invest[ing] in tools that dramatically reduce the amount of data required to use most apps”; and “supporting[ing] the development of sustainable new business models and services that make it easier for people to access the internet.” In short: “By reducing the cost and amount of data required for most apps and enabling new business models, Internet.org is focused on enabling the next 5 billion people to come online.”
Internet.org may appear to be doing charitable work—it’s certainly enrobing itself in the aura of charity, with soaring rhetoric and a heartfelt video—but it is a project with clear self-interest for every company involved. Its founding members are Facebook, Ericsson, MediaTek, Nokia, Opera, Qualcomm, and Samsung—or, in other words, the world’s largest social network, the world’s largest wireless-network equipment maker, one of the world’s largest phone makers, a browser company, a wireless-industry titan, and one of the world’s largest and most successful technology conglomerates, respectively. These companies stand to benefit immensely from each of these initiatives, and from the prospect of putting Internet-connected phones in the hands of five billion more customers. One can imagine a perfect end product of this partnership: a Nokia phone packed with a Qualcomm chip and Samsung memory, connected to Ericsson networking equipment running Facebook and the Opera Web browser. Everybody wins.
It is little secret that developing areas of the world represent vast, largely untapped, wells of potential customers for technology companies. This reality may be starkest of all, most immediately, for Facebook: its growth has slowed significantly in North America and Europe, where over fifty per cent of Americans already use Facebook at least once a month. Accordingly, as Ben Popper at the Verge notes, developing countries are Facebook’s fastest-growing revenue stream, increasing at nearly double the rate of North America and Europe—and its penetration in Asia and Africa hovers in the single digits. So Facebook, unsurprisingly, had a plan to pursue users in every corner of the globe even before Internet.org. The plan, detailed by Christopher Mims at Quartz, has already seen some spectacular successes: for instance, its Facebook Zero product, designed to put Facebook on the least capable of phones, has more than doubled Facebook usage in Africa.
The problem with Internet.org isn’t that its members stand to reap enormous benefits if another five billion people are connected to the Internet. That’s fine; it’s hardly the first humanitarian project to benefit its benefactors. But the organization appears to be shirking some of the hardest work—building the infrastructure needed to connect people to the Web—hoping that, if it makes that work easier and more profitable, someone else might do it. In Zuckerberg’s manifesto “Is Connectivity a Human Right?” he notes that one big obstacle to ubiquitous Internet access is that “the global infrastructure required to deliver the internet is extremely expensive and costs tens of billions of dollars every year,” because delivering the Internet requires things like land, electricity, pipes to carry data to and from cell towers, and the proper airwaves to transmit data from those towers to mobile devices.
Yet Vindu Goel writes in the New York Times that Internet.org “does not plan to tackle some thorny infrastructure issues that are huge barriers in the developing world, particularly the long-distance transmission of data to far-flung places.” And while the organization wants to lower the cost of data, Goel points out that part of the reason that it is expensive in some areas is because of physical infrastructure: in Africa, “the continent sorely lack[s] local interconnection points, forcing most requests for content like YouTube videos to be routed through Europe at high cost.”
Zuckerberg also writes that an obstacle to connecting people to the Web is that “a lot of people don’t have phones.” But instead of offering even a scratch-pad idea of a solution—community-oriented computing devices, for instance—he shrugs. “Over time we’ll need to connect them too, but for now we don’t yet have a plan for delivering internet to people who don’t have phones or computers, so we’re not covering that here,” he writes. Google’s Loon project, which is experimenting with delivering the Internet to far-out areas via stratospheric balloons, may sound insane, and it may not work, but at least it’s attempting to tackle one of the truly hard problems, which is physical access to the Internet.
Meanwhile, revealing the depth of the Internet-access problem, developing areas aren’t the only places that need help connecting people: on Monday, the Times reported that despite spending seven billion dollars since 2009, President Obama has seen his initiatives to expand U.S. Internet access stagnate. While the Internet is now available to ninety-eight per cent of homes, twenty per cent of American adults still do not use it—which was basically the situation when he took office. And it is a problem: the Times writes that the lack of Internet access results in people being “shut off from jobs, government services, health care and education,” while “the social and economic effects of that gap are looming larger.”
It’s undoubtedly true that, as Zuckerberg told the Times, “The Internet is such an important thing for driving humanity forward.” It should certainly be a goal to connect every person on the planet. But, as Zuckerberg also pointed out, it is just as true that “it’s not going to build itself.” And Internet.org would be far more impressive if it planned to do a little more building.
