Facebook Wants to Bring the Internet to the World

Mark Zuckerberg and his friends are on a quest to bring Facebook — and the internet — to the entire world.

On Tuesday, Zuckerberg announced that he's joined forces with tech heavy-hitters like Samsung, Nokia, Qualcomm and Ericsson, to launch a new initiative called Internet.org.

In a post on his own Facebook account, Zuckerberg wrote,

We now connect more than 1 billion people, but to connect the next 5 billion we must solve a much bigger problem: the vast majority of people don't have access to the internet. I'm focused on this because I think it's one of the greatest challenges of our generation.

Currently, about one-third of the world's population, around 2.7 billion people, have internet access. Internet.org wants to bring the other five billion people into the fold. How will that happen you ask? Well the group plans to drastically cut the cost of providing internet on mobile phones in developing countries. To do that, they will work together to simplify phone applications and beef up phones and networks so that more data can be exchanged while using less battery power.

Internet.org wants to cut the price of delivering internet service by about 99 percent in the next five to 10 years. In addition to helping phones work better, the organization wants to come up with new business models that would allow phone companies to provide services like email and social media for a minimal, or no, charge.

The ultimate goal is a tall order which will require major changes to the way phones, data plans, and business models are structured. That doesn't even include the very practical problem of infrastructure, which will involve figuring out new ways to transmit internet and data over very long distances.

The move to help out the technologically underserved isn't totally altruistic though. The Facebook behemoth has largely saturated the developed market, leaving its founders and other social media organizations searching for new avenues of growth. Building up internet in other parts of the world will greatly help in that endeavor.