Mark Zuckerberg, the mind and chief executive behind the popular social networking site Facebook, is now taking a step into the realm of humanitarian by asking if Internet connectivity is a human right.
The CEO laid out his thoughts on the matter on the company's press site Tuesday night when he announced that Facebook will be joined by a handful of other tech companies to execute an already laid out plan to make Internet access more affordable across the globe.
"For almost ten years, Facebook has been on a mission to make the world more open and connected," Zuckerberg wrote. "Today we connect more than 1.15 billion people each month, but as we started thinking about connecting the next 5 billion, we realized something important: the vast majority of people in the world don't have access to the internet."
Facebook will be joined by Ericsson, MediaTek, Nokia, Opera, Qualcomm and Samsung to try and connect two-thirds of the world's population together through the power of Internet connectivity, according to the Washington Post. The group has set up a website, Internet.org, where they have outlined their plans in more detail.
This project is slightly different from Google's Project Loon, although the two have similar goals. The Loon project is a way for the company to bring the Internet to under developed parts of the world that don't otherwise have access through the use of balloons that float overhead and boost a wireless signal to an affected area. The Internet.org plan is more focused on expanding and improving current network technology to make it more available to unconnected parts of the world.
While it sounds like a benevolent idea, it's worth noting that each of these companies stands to make a profit off of more people using the Internet. However, it will be a very long time before any real revenue can be seen by any of the Internet.org group, so for now the project is just a road map to a more connected future.
In his paper explaining the idea, Zuckerberg wrote: "I hope this rough plan can serve as a blueprint for some of what we'll all need to do to connect the next 5 billion people,"
