At the United Nations on Saturday, Mark Zuckerberg declared his intentions to get the entire world on Facebook online, arguing that internet access is the key to ending extreme poverty.
“When people have access to the tools and knowledge of the internet, they have access to opportunities that make life better for all of us,” said a declaration signed by Zuckerberg, along with Bill and Melinda Gates and Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales. As ABC reports, Zuckerberg and Gates are both throwing resources into the lofty goal of bringing internet to all by 2020.
At a lunch hosted by the United Nations Private Sector Forum, Zuckerberg went so far as to claim that Facebook will even help bring internet to refugee camps, The New York Times reports. How exactly the 31 year old billionaire plans to achieve that goal isn’t yet clear.
If Zuck’s digital utopian aspirations sound familiar, it’s because we’ve seen them before. Remember Internet.org, the poor man’s Facebook-controlled internet Zuckerberg unleashed on the world in 2013? Developing countries remember it. In April 2015, 64 organisations from around the world sent an open letter to Facebook’s CEO complaining that “Facebooknet” violates the principles of net-neutrality, which, yea, it absolutely does.
We’ll have to wait and see what ‘ol Zuck’s got in store for us this time, but here’s one possibility: A network of giant drones that beam internet across the far corners of the planet using lasers. Basically, Skynet.
[The New York Times] [CNN] [ABC News]
Top image: Getty