Internet for another four billion people

The most recent numbers from the ITU show that only 40% of the world’s population has access to the Internet. This means that roughly 4 billion people, 90% of whom live in developing countries, do not. Facebook studies have found that connecting the rest of the world to the Internet could raise long-term productivity by as much as 25% in developing economies, generate $2.2 trillion in additional GDP, and increase personal incomes by up to $600 per person a year, thus lifting 160 million people out of extreme poverty.

Access to the Internet is therefore fundamental to growth. It is not simply a business objective; it is also a political imperative for many developing nations.

So you can imagine why this has been an important topic at the World Economic Forum East Asia Summit in Jakarta this year. Indonesia has a mobile penetration of 120%+, but only 35% of the population is connected to the Internet and 26% use a smartphone. Shockingly, 21% of the population doesn’t even have access to a basic phone. The key question now is how to get more people connected to the Internet?

There is, thankfully, consistency at the base level of policy making. We need to:

• Provide more affordable smartphonesto get them into the hands of individuals.
• Raise literacy standards to ensure people are able to move from voice to data services. Literacy is around 94% in Indonesia and 70% in India. The issue of dealing with literacy should also address vernacular content: there are nine institutional languages and 719 dialects in Indonesia.
• Enable access to affordable Internet, either by lowering data charges further (Indonesia has one of the lowest data rates worldwide), providing new infrastructure solutions (like Google’s Loon project or government subsidies for network rollout), or shifting the business model (for example, via zero-rated plans, where developers rather than end users pay for data usage).
• Promote a service ecosystemand applications development community. Currently social media plays a strong role as the most important application in smartphones. There are 69 million Facebook users in Indonesia, and Jakarta is the Twitter capital of the world.

I am most concerned about our ability to enable affordable Internet access. Specifically, zero-rated plans by telecom operators in India have come under fire as they have been painted as a move that violates net neutrality. I would be concerned if this thinking spread to other parts of the world, since this is fundamentally flawed logic. Telecom operators have a vested interest to get every single person online. Zero-rated plans are a new business model that can help bring the next 4 billion online by enabling application development providers to foot the bill instead of end users. Simply put, many poor people can get onto the Internet thanks to these plans. That should be the ultimate goal, for governments, businesses, and individuals alike.