Mark Zuckerberg is determined to expand Internet access in India, and the rest of the world for that matter.
The Facebook CEO repeated that ambition during a town hall meeting Wednesday at the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi. Zuckerberg told the audience of students and professionals that the social network's mission is to make the Internet accessible to the entire world, them included. Facebook
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg discusses the need for more Internet access in India during a town hall session in New Delhi.
"If you really have a mission of connecting every person in the world, you can't do that without helping to connect everyone in India," he said. "We take that very seriously."
The hour-long question-and-answer session came during Zuckerberg's second trip in the past year to India, underscoring the country's importance to the tech giant. With 132 million Facebook users, India's user base is second only to the United States' 193 million monthly active users.
How far is Facebook willing to go to win over India's population? The social network this week launched "2G Tuesdays," an internal program that aims to give its workers a sense of the very slow Internet connections typically found in India and parts of Asia and Africa.
The Menlo Park, California-based company has been active in trying to spread free, basic Internet access to underserved parts of the globe. To emphasize the "free" aspect, Facebook in late Septemberchanged the name of Internet.org, its website offering free Internet services, to Free Basics. In the past year, the service has gone online to more than a billion people in 19 countries.
Critics have charged that the free service violates the concept of Net neutrality by favoring content from Facebook over other providers' content. During Wednesday's meeting in India, Zuckerberg was asked if he "100 percent" supports Net neutrality, the idea that all traffic on the Internet should be treated equally.
"Net neutrality is an important principle," he said. "We do a lot to support it, both in terms of pushing for regulation that kind of enables us and building an open platform that any developer can build something for, regardless of who they are, as long as they follow the rules [of Free Basics]."
http://www.cnet.com/news/zuckerberg-we-have-a-moral-obligation-to-connect-india-to-the-internet/
