Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook, has just announced the introduction of internet.org. Just what is internet.org? It happens to be a global partnership that will have the ultimate goal of making internet access available to the other 5 billion people on the planet. Now, where have we heard of such an idea before? Ah right – Google’s Project Loon does have the possibility of delivering internet connectivity at decent speeds due to the nature of its design, but I guess internet.org will do things a little bit differently.
Wanting to bring internet connectivity to the remaining population outside of the 2.7 billion connected folks, the ultimate aim is to offer everyone similar opportunities to remain hooked up (and perhaps increase Facebook’s subscription rate along the way?). The list of founding members of internet.org include Facebook, Ericsson, MediaTek, Nokia, Opera, Qualcomm and Samsung, and with their powers combined, Captain Planet – er, nay, it will result in joint projects, shared knowledge, and be a platform to mobilize industry and governments in order to bring the rest of the world to an online future. Do you think that this particular initiative would be able to achieve its goal at long last? The three key challenges internet.org are focusing on would be to make access more affordable, to use data more efficiently, and to assist businesses to drive access. [Press Release]
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