A year ago, Facebook announced the formation of Internet.org, a “global partnership” aimed at spreading Internet connectivity in the developing world.
The .org moniker and the lofty rhetoric suggested a philanthropic venture. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in a February speech at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, referred to Internet.org this way: “It’s this industry coalition that’s working together to build—to make delivering the Internet and all the different parts of it more efficient and to make it so that everyone in the world can have access to some basic services on the Internet for either a really affordable price or free.”
Yet a look at Internet.org’s management structure, its priorities and its ambitions make it clear that the effort sits squarely within Facebook’s broader business development efforts.
