Barcelona: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made a big effort to appease telecom operators when he spoke at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Monday.
Speaking at the world’s biggest annual gathering of the mobile industry, Zuckerberg emphasized that it is the telecom companies working to connect the world, not Facebook.
“We are different from operators, we are trying to help people connect with other people,” Zuckerberg said. “It’s really important to not lose sight of the fact that the ones that are driving this are the operators.”
Zuckerberg has emphasized that his company’s primary goal is to connect billions more people to the Internet all around the world.
He left no stone unturned to woo telecom operators and convince them that Internet.org, the initiative he launched to help bring more of the developing world online, is not a threat to their businesses.Â
His comments come amid an increasingly rancorous debate in which telecom and cable firms complain Silicon Valley giants such as Facebook and Google Inc that offer Web services are freeloading on the big investments they make in mobile and fixed-line networks.
They feel the operators that invest in building the networks get left behind because tech companies build apps like WhatsApp that help people communicate for free.
Internet.org, which Facebook helped set up with mobile equipment industry backing two years ago, wants to make basic Internet services available to the nearly two-thirds of the world’s population who are not yet connected.
The non-profit group seeks to coax operators to subsidize free Internet usage on a bet the phone companies can eventually turn free users into paying customers.
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