Zuckerberg: we have a moral responsibility to those without internet access (and to kill game invites)
Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg took part in a Q&A session at the Indian Institute of Technology in Dehli, responding to queries ranging from the Internet.org project to Candy Crush notifications. Not for the first time, he found himself jumping to the defence of the program which aims to connect millions of people to the internet. He denied that the walled-garden of Internet.org went against the idea of net neutrality, but conceded that people had to "follow the basic rules of what Internet.org is".
He pointed out that existing net neutrality laws made exceptions for free services, but these loopholes have been described by critics as 'fatal'. In a wide-ranging talk, Zuckerberg also announced plans to kill one of the biggest irritants of the social network -- game invites for the likes of FarmVille and Candy Crush.
Ahead of the talk in India, the Facebook CEO had asked for questions to be put forward. One that was suggested was "I don’t want any more invitations to Candy Crush. How can I stop it?", and it was quickly voted up by Zuckerberg's followers. The good news? Plans are afoot to bring irritating game notifications and invites to an end.
I sent a message to the person who runs the team in charge of our developer platform and I said by the time I do this Town Hall Q&A, I think it would be good if we had a solution to this problem [...] We hadn’t prioritised shutting [...] down [game notifications] because we just had other priorities but if this is the top thing that people care about then we’ll prioritize that and we'll do it.
Returning to subject of Internet.org, Zuckerberg tried to silence its critics by saying:
If there's a fisherman in the village who now has access to [the] internet to sell some of his fish and provide for his family, no one gets hurt by that. That's good.
We all have a moral responsibility to look out for people who don't have the internet. The people who aren't on the internet can't sign a petition pushing for more access to the internet.
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