Inside Facebook's Plan to Wire the World: Mark Zuckerberg's Crusade to Put Every Single Human Being Online

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been thinking about Facebook’s long-term future at least since the site exceeded a billion users in 2012. One answer was to put down bets on emerging platforms and distribution channels, in the form of some big-ticket acquisitions. But fulfilling the actual mission, connecting the entire world, wouldn’t actually, literally be possible unless everybody in the world were on the Internet.

So Zuckerberg has decided to make sure everybody is. There’s something distasteful about the whole business: a global campaign by a bunch of Silicon Valley jillionaires to convert literally everybody into data consumers, to make sure no eyeballs anywhere go unexposed to their ads. The other way of looking at Internet.org is the way Internet.org wants to be looked at: it’s spreading Internet access because the Internet makes people’s lives better.