Zuckerberg Promises To Help Bring The World Online, No Matter What The Cost

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
The CEO of Facebook, one of the world’s largest social media networks, said on Friday that his firm is willing to spend billions of dollars in order to help bring the Internet to all corners of the world, various media outlets have reported.
“We feel a big responsibility to bring the Internet to more people,” the company’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, said Friday at an event held in Mexico City and hosted by billionaire and by America Movil SAB chairman emeritus Carlos Slim, Bloomberg Businessweek‘s Patricia Laya and Sarah Frier reported on Saturday.
According to Reuters reporter Christine Murray, International Telecommunications Union (ITU) statistics indicate approximately three billion people worldwide will have access to the Internet by the end of 2014. Nearly half of them (1.3 billion people) use Facebook, which last year launched a project known as Internet.org which seeks to connect billions of men and women living in places such as Asia and Africa with the assistance of phone operators, she added.
“What we really care about is connecting everyone in the world. Even if it means that Facebook has to spend billions of dollars over the next decade making this happen, I believe that over the long term its gonna be a good thing for us and for the world,” the news organization quoted Zuckerberg as saying at Friday’s event. “I believe that… when everyone is on the Internet all of our businesses and economies will be better.”
However, the Facebook CEO’s desire to bring more people online isn’t completely altruistic, because as Laya and Frier pointed out, “the more people that are connected to the Web, the more room Facebook has to grow,” especially in the wake of its proposed $19 billion acquisition of mobile phone messaging company WhatsApp Inc.
At the conference, Zuckerberg said he believed WhatsApp had the potential to be “the global text messaging platform” and would give the social network the opportunity to connect up to three billion people worldwide, the Bloomberg reporters said. As for the Internet.org initiative, Laya and Frier said that Facebook’s board members asked the CEO if he believed the project could be profitable. In response, Zuckerberg said that it could help local economies, and that helping local economies could ultimately help Facebook’s business.
Zuckerberg’s desire to bring Internet to the masses is nothing new. In August 2013, he announced a “rough plan” on how he hoped to provide Internet to nearly five billion people currently unconnected around the world online. To achieve that goal, Facebook and founding partners Ericsson, MediaTek, Nokia, Opera, Qualcomm and Samsung hoped to make Internet access more affordable while also reducing the amount of data required to load websites and applications, and providing businesses with access.
“Everything Facebook has done has been about giving all people around the world the power to connect,” the Facebook CEO said at the time. “There are huge barriers in developing countries to connecting and joining the knowledge economy. Internet.org brings together a global partnership that will work to overcome these challenges, including making internet access available to those who cannot currently afford it.”
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