Internet.org: Connecting the Unconnected
The economy has changed drastically over the past century, especially after the emergence of the internet. We used to live in a world that was resource based – people exchanged goods and services based on physical ownership. Now we live in an economy that is knowledge based. Knowledge and information are the goods exchanged and the internet is the backbone to this system. However, only one-third of the economy is connected to the internet. This presents a growing problem for many impoverished nations by restricting access to knowledge that is instrumental in accelerating economic growth.
Internet.org is attempting to tackle this issue. This non-profit organization was conceptualized by Mark Zuckerberg, the current founder and CEO of Facebook, and aims to bring affordable internet access to the two-thirds of the world that are not “connected”. The organization plans to tackle the problem from both a demand and supply side perspective. By lowering the cost of serving data by building new infrastructure, cleaning up air waves, and developing low cost hardware, and reducing the amount of data required through caching and compressing, the organization can increase the “supply” of the internet. Internet.org also plans to increase the “demand” of the internet by building incentives for users to connect and better mental models for those who are unfamiliar with the technology.
The benefits of connecting the remaining two-thirds of the world via the internet are abundant and can be examined from a networks perspective. We can model the transfer of information between people as a graph consisting of nodes (the people) and edges (the flow of knowledge between them). The nodes that are not connected in the graph represent the two-thirds of the population that are “unconnected” and can, potentially, be connected via the internet. Thus, the internet is the mechanism for creating edges between disconnected nodes. In class, we briefly discussed Social Capital as the notion that individuals and groups can derive benefits from an underlying social network. Although there is no consensus on what kinds of network structures are the most effective for creating social capital, bridges (or edges that provide nodes with access to parts of the network that are unreachable by other means) can prove instrumental in the transfer of valuable knowledge. The advantages of bridges include early access to information originating in multiple, non-interacting parts of the network and the opportunity for novel ideas by combining different sets of information.
Internet.org serves to create these crucial bridges with the use of the internet. This would mean a wealth of benefits for underprivileged groups in the form of education, better career opportunities, background on political views, social networking, etc. It would also mean more knowledge on the prevention of epidemics such as Ebola and Polio for developed countries. Overall, this non-profit organization will be able to significantly increase the amount of social capital available within the information network.
Sources:
http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/01/the-challenge-of-connecting-the-unconnected/
http://internet.org/