Say what you want to about Facebook and its founder Mark Zuckerberg, but when he talks (no matter the subject matter) people will listen.

At Mobile World Congress, this year’s first day was closed off by Zuckerberg – talking about Internet.org and of course Facebook.

“We believe that everbody should have access to the internet. Its crazy that we are sitting here in 2016 and and still 4 billion people in the world don’t have access to the internet,” he said, after talking about his baby Max (again) for about five minutes.

While it is a mammoth task to connect all of those people, Zuckerberg is aware that it can’t be solved by just one company or organisation.

“We just want to do what we can to help. Facebook’s mission is to connect everyone in the world, and we can’t really do that if we don’t help to connect people to the internet.”

Internet.org is a program across the world which aims to connect to people to a host of different websites for free. Part of that program is also Free Basics, which is pretty much the same thing, but not all countries are happy with it – especially India.

With Free Basic, we have helped 19 million people get on the internet before, which is a pretty good first step. But you know, we recently had this ruling India that says that there are no differential pricing for services – so free services are out. Its a major setback in India.”

With everything that Facebook and Zuckerberg is doing, he answered a question as to what their business model is with programes like Free Basics and Internet.org – and he was quick to explain that he doesn’t want to make money from it.

“On all these other things, we are not really focused on making money. With Free Basic, we have even committed to app that don’t run ads. So we’re full aligned with everyone else in the ecosystem. Operators who want to help folks are coming online, and we don’t really want to have any business success where people think we are misaligned until everyone else is making money first. But our real goal, is just to help people get on the internet,” he said.

The founder also spoke of a low cost box which people will be able to purchase to provide internet connectivity to those in their community. Zuckerberg hopes to roll out at least 10 000 of these boxes before the end of the year.

Zuckerberg then moved on to the topic of virtual reality and how the platform is growing at a rapid rate. “Even just in Gear VR there have been over a million hours of VR video watched,” said the Facebook founder.

But a big part of VR penetration and the success of the platform will be access to better internet.

“A big part of what’s enabling video to become big today is the ability to stream increasingly high quality video. But that’s going to have to get even a lot better for VR,” he said to the crowd.

Zuckerberg then explained for networks and services to enjoy this move to a data-hungry user base, networks will need to increase the adoption rate of technologies such as 5G and LTE-Advanced technology.

This has the pay off of bringing subscribers to the network and giving the people that use the network the ability to connect with those they want.

Speaking about the value of over-the-top services and the value they have in the marketplace, Zuckerberg remarked, “what’s really great about services like Messenger, WhatsApp, is they create a more intimate environment that doesn’t need to be curated. It’s a bit more personal and raw, and a reason to just be yourself.”

As for the calls for regulation OTT services face in countries like South Africa, Zuckerberg sees it a bit differently. “When I hear calls for regulation from network operators what I hear is “we need to the freedom to innovate in a regulated enviroment” and we’re all for that” he said. But shortly after that Zuckerberg explained that the rules that apply to network operators don’t apply to developers.

“Network operators are evolving away from traditional services such as voice and text towards data. In many parts of the world this transition has happened and in other parts they’re still working on it,” he said.

Finally, when Zuckerberg was asked whether he would let his daughter use Facebook his response was “I need some time to figure that out but I hope she grows up loving technology.”

Who knows, maybe in the future Max will speaking about Internet.org and Free Basics.

[Image – CC by 2.0/Maurizio Pesce]