NEW DELHI
Connectivity is a human right, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has told a major technology conference in India.
Zuckerberg said that connecting people to the world was “one of the fundamental challenges of our generation.”
“We want to help build an internet that works for everyone,” Zuckerberg said, kicking off the first ‘Internet.org’ summit in New Delhi, India on Thursday.
Internet.org is a global Facebook-led partnership between technology leaders, non-profit organizations, local communities and experts who are working to bring the internet to the two-thirds of the world’s population without online access.
Ericsson, Mediatek, Opera Software, Samsung, Nokia and Qualcomm are some of other major organizations which have joined the initiative.
Zuckerberg said that more than a billion Indians were not connected to the Internet, meaning they lacked equal opportunities. The 30-year-old will meet Indian Prime Minister Narenda Modi on Friday.
Connecting thousands of Indian villages to the internet will be a focus point of the meeting.
“Connectivity cannot just be a privilege for some of the rich and powerful,” Zuckerberg said. “It needs to be something that everyone shares, an opportunity for everyone.”
He said that through connectivity “we can get close to the people that we care about; we can get access to new jobs and opportunities and ideas.”
“We can receive education and healthcare, communication and access to news services.”
The Facebook founder said that Internet.org over the last year had been working to overcome major barriers preventing more than four billion people from connecting to the internet.
“We announced the Connectivity Lab and our work on satellites and planes to overcome limits in physical infrastructure,” he said, adding that: “We’ve built systems to make apps use less data, reducing your data bills”.
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