Jakarta Globe – AFP, August 21, 2013
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| A man is silhouetted against a video screen with an Facebook logo as he poses with a laptop in this photo illustration taken in the central Bosnian town of Zenica on Aug. 14, 2013. (Reuters Photo/Dado Ruvic) |
New York
City. Facebook and other technology giants launched an initiative on Wednesday
designed to give the whole world access to the Internet.
The project
is entitled Internet.org and its goal is to extend Internet access to five
billion people by cutting the cost of smart phone-based Internet services in
developing countries.
“Everything
Facebook has done has been about giving all people around the world the power
to connect,” Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said.
“There are
huge barriers in developing countries to connecting and joining the knowledge
economy,” he said, adding that the project aimed to make it easier and cheaper
to connecting to the web.
The other
partners in the project are Nokia, Ericsson, Samsung, Qualcomm, MediaTek and
Opera, while Twitter and LinkedIn are also due to sign up.
Today some
2.7 billion people, just over a third of the world’s population, have access to
the Internet, and the number of new users is growing only slowly each year, a
statement said.
“The goal
of Internet.org is to make Internet access available to the two-thirds of the
world who are not yet connected, and to bring the same opportunities to
everyone that the connected third of the world has today,” the statement said.
The seven
founding partners are going to develop joint projects, share knowledge and
mobilize governments and industry to bring the world online.
Specifically,
they want to simplify mobile apps to make them more efficient and improve
telephone components and networks so they perform better while consuming less
energy.
They also
want to develop lower-cost, higher-quality smartphones and partnerships to more
broadly deploy Internet access in underserved communities.
Zuckerberg
insisted in an interview with CNN that the project was not simply aimed at
generating more customers.
“If we were
just focused on making money, the first billion people we’ve connected have way
more money than the rest of the next six billion combined. It’s not fair but
it’s the way that it is,” he said.
The
partnership emulates one launched by Facebook in 2011 called Open Compute
Project, which also aims to improve the materials used in call centers and make
them less energy-hungry.
That
project was originally met with scepticism but has gradually won over the major
players in the computer industry.
The new
thrust comes at a key time for tech groups. Mature markets are saturated and
have little potential for significant growth, while poor regions like Africa,
Latin America and some parts of Asia are pools of potential new customers.
Agence France-Presse
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