Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave an interview to Bloomberg following a trip to India and Southeast Asia in support of his global Internet.org initiative. The goal of the project is to connect all the Earth's inhabitants to the Internet and provide them with free access to a basic set of Internet services, including Facebook.
Zuckerberg's main point was that only a third of the world's population is connected to the Internet. At the same time, most of the remaining two-thirds of the Earth's inhabitants have the technical and financial ability to connect, but do not understand why they need it. Facebook is ready to spend significant funds to change the situation, without waiting for the return of investments in the next 30 years.
Free connection of users of developing countries to a basic set of services - by text message, "Wikipedia", job search systems, to financial and medical data, etc. will allow to develop online information consumption, increase the number of paid subscribers and finance the development of national networks at their expense. Facebook itself will not provide "heavy" content for free - when you try to click on a video, the social network will offer to pay for full access to the Internet.
The first country with which Facebook began cooperation within the framework of Internet.org was Zambia, where the project gave good results. Thus, informing the population of Zambia and Kenya about the Ebola virus and HIV as part of the program contributed to curbing epidemics on the continent. In Asia, Internet.org works with the governments of Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines.