Can Facebook bring Internet access to 5 billion more people?

Mark Zuckerberg wants to add 5 billion more Facebook friends.

Well, not exactly. But he does want to expand the Internet’s reach to 5 billion more residents of this increasingly interconnected planet earth.

In a white paper titled “A Focus on Efficiencyreleased this week under the aegis of Internet.org, a consortium of companies who’ve adopted the same aim of expanding online access, the Facebook founder outlines a plan to expand technology reach and the importance of the Internet as a human right, a way to pull away from a zero-sum resource-based economy and plug into its knowledge-based counterpart.

The plan depends on a couple critical innovations: To bring down the underlying costs of delivering information and to use less data by making apps more efficient, Zuckerberg writes:

If the industry can achieve a 10x improvement in each of these areas — delivering data and building more efficient apps — then it becomes economically...

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