Connecting Everyone To Internet 'Would Add $6.7 Trillion To Global Economy' (theguardian.com) 117
An anonymous reader writes: A report, titled Connecting the world: Ten mechanisms for global inclusion, and prepared for Facebook by PwC, says that global economic output would increase by $6.7 trillion if internet access was brought to the 4.1 billion people in the world who do not currently have it. It's estimated that this would raise 500 million people out of poverty. The company behind the report says affordability, rather than infrastructure, is the main barrier to internet adoption in most areas. More than 90% of people live in areas where the infrastructure exists to get them online, but most of them can't afford to do so. The report describes a 500MB data plan that costs more than 5% of one's monthly income as "unaffordable." Ethiopia, Nigeria and the Philippines, for example, would need to cut the price of internet access by over 90% in order for 80% of their populations to get online. Improved technology, or even installing existing technology in developing nations, will be sufficient in bringing much of this cost reduction. Facebook's Internet.org project, aimed at partnering carriers in developing nations to give low-cost internet access, has been criticized for allowing users to access some websites, like Wikipedia and Facebook, without paying for the data they use. Others say such an approach is worth it in the long run. "The important thing here is to get things moving," says Jonathan Tate, technology consulting leader at PwC. The report' authors estimate that the last 500 million people to get online won't be able to rely on piecemeal improvements. Instead, they'll need new "disruptive technologies" being created by companies like Google, with its Project Loon plan to mount internet access points on balloons, and Facebook, with its solar-powered, laser-armed 4G drone called Aquila.
Interesting (Score:5, Funny)
I hole-hardedly agree, but allow me to play doubles advocate here for a moment. For all intensive purposes I think you are wrong. In an age where false morals are a diamond dozen, true virtues are a blessing in the skies. We often put our false morality on a petal stool like a bunch of pre-Madonnas, but you all seem to be taking something very valuable for granite. So I ask of you to mustard up all the strength you can because it is a doggy dog world out there. Although there is some merit to what you are saying it seems like you have a huge ship on your shoulder. In your argument you seem to throw everything in but the kids Nsync, and even though you are having a feel day with this I am here to bring you back into reality. I have a sick sense when it comes to these types of things. It is almost spooky, because I cannot turn a blonde eye to these glaring flaws in your rhetoric. I have zero taller ants when it comes to people spouting out hate in the name of moral righteousness. You just need to remember what comes around is all around, and when supply and command fails you will be the first to go. Make my words, when you get down to brass stacks it doesnt take rocket appliances to get two birds stoned at once. It's clear who makes the pants in this relationship, and sometimes you just have to swallow your prize and accept the facts. You might have to come to this conclusion through denial and error but I swear on my mother's mating name that when you put the petal to the medal you will pass with flying carpets like its a peach of cake.
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Maybe it was a joke (Score:1)
Banks own a large share of Facebook, and now apparently want their cut, with a leverage.
If every poor fellow gets a 'smart'phone almost for free ($7/piece proposed by the Indian PM) they can start making payments with it.
Then cash can be removed (because those damn terrorists, you know?) and there will be no escape. Everybody will pay a fee over every transaction he makes and all transaction details will be known to bank & facebook.
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The post is not original content.
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put the pedal to the medal
to the metal.
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Dude, that's beautiful!
laudable but.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Lift 1/2 billion people out of poverty? How so. I realize it's a laudable goal but still I can't see how just having Internet access would do that. Yes people could get online educational access but where's the revenue stream supposed to come? There has to be infrastructure supporting this as well. Call me jaded but I don't think in and of itself would get rid of poverty.
Re:laudable but.. (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, this. And it's not even a question of "where's the revenue stream supposed to come" - it's more a question of "from where is the actual real wealth (e.g., food, material, new manufactured items, etc.) supposed to come?"
Internet access can only facilitate information transfer. It doesn't directly increase manufacturing output, it doesn't fix broken property ownership laws, and doesn't really remove barriers to entry to wealth-producing activities. (It does reduce barriers to entry to many service activities, but you can't eat, live in, wear, or use services to power your machines.)
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This extreme short termist approach to life is a consequence of growing up in circumstances where the alternative to a short termist approach is death.
My point is that where whole communities are poor, providing any kind of resources often has li
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A whole new group of newbie idiots is going to be tricked out of their money
My first thought too. As Zucherberg's definition of "economy" is advertising revenue, this is about him receiving the $6.7 trillion.
PS: This page's http address says $67 trillion - even better for FB.
Re:laudable but.. (Score:4, Insightful)
It doesn't directly increase manufacturing output
Actually, by automating supply chains, it does.
it doesn't fix broken property ownership laws
Actually, it does this too. By bypassing corrupt local officials, automating title searches, integrating maps, etc., countries with internet access have done much better than those without at reforming property ownership laws, and establishing clear title to land.
doesn't really remove barriers to entry to wealth-producing activities.
Actually, the internet helps a lot here too. Many localities have moved licenses for various wealth-producing activities online. Applying through a website is much faster, and less likely to be delayed by bribe seeking bureaucrats. Websites like ipaidabribe.com [ipaidabribe.com] make reporting corruption much easier.
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By bypassing corrupt local officials, automating title searches, integrating maps, etc., countries with internet access have done much better than those without at reforming property ownership laws, and establishing clear title to land.
Nothing to do with the internet, not where I live (UK) anyway. Clear title to land was a project that resulted in establishing the Land Registry here, long before the internet. Things like that get done only if people, including the "officials" and other autorities want them to be done, interernet or not.
Websites ... make reporting corruption much easier.
No, because people get bored with stories of corruption, or it does not affect them, or they don't believe the stories, or there is too much noise on the internet for them to be heard.
For example I often
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Remember, I said directly. You have to have a supply chain in order to automate it. The Internet cannot automate anything anyway - you have to have machines to automate. So while the 'net can connect existing machines, it cannot create new ones. That's what I meant by direct.
Property ownership is ultimately enforc
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Again, the internet cannot change or enforce laws; only people can do that.
Sure, bits flying through cables cannot directly change anything. But neither could the printing press, or writing, or language, or the discovery of fire. But it is equally silly to say that those "didn't change anything".
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The planet would be more sustainable if we try redistributing existing wealth first.
After you.
It might be fairer, but why would it be more sustainable? People with more money generally waste more. Not much gets wasted in poor third world villages, and we know that such villages are sustainable because such a way of life has existed for 10,000 or more years. We do not know that the "wealthy" 21st century developed nations' way of life (that you and Zucherberg want to spread around) is sustainable. It almost certainly isn't.
My parent's generation (in the UK) used to make and mend all sor
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so they aren't stuck on islands of idiocy.
Like the internet is not an ocean of idiocy. Including your post. Do you even poor?
fuck this (Score:2, Insightful)
bullshit!!!!!!!!!
what is wrong with this place.
No nerd would do anything but laugh at that headline.
aka Facebook wants more subjects to datamine (Score:3)
I don't see how anyone apart from facebook is going to get financially better from this.
Companies make statements like this, without actually backing it up with facts.
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Think of the ISPs!
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Man that's a lot of extra Nigerian scams.
Damn, you've blown it. That is where the $6.7 trillion was coming from.
Sure it would (Score:3)
Wait a minute... slow down... (Score:1)
There are people who aren't connected to the internet yet!?
Are all the ports full?
Despots Control Those Countries (Score:5, Informative)
Baloney. The 4+ billion people who don't already have internet access are primarily peasant farmers who are struggling to feed themselves, much less add anything to their national (or even local) economies. They don't have the tools or the knowledge nor the willingness to learn anything that would allow them to jump to first-world levels of productivity. In most places, they have neither reliable electrical power nor reliable potable water, and those folks need clean water a WHOLE lot more than they need internet access.
Probably half of those people would never be ALLOWED to connect to the internet, even if it were possible to provide access. Iran, Saudi Arabia, China, many of the impoverished African kleptocracies... which of those governments would ever allow their subjects any information about a better way of life?
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Exactly. How the fuck are they going to pay for ...
* electricity ... when they can barely afford food / water ??? Assuming Fazebook pays for 100% of the infrastructure how is them being connected to the internet going to add _anything_ to the global economy??
* computer / laptop
* ISP / network connection
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Reddit fucktards: The downvote button is for "This post adds nothing of value to the discussion", not"I disagree."
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Probably half of those people would never be ALLOWED to connect to the internet, even if it were possible to provide access. Iran, Saudi Arabia, China, many of the impoverished African kleptocracies... which of those governments would ever allow their subjects any information about a better way of life?
You're pretty ignorant.
Iran: 39 million (49%) [internetlivestats.com]
Saudi-Arabia: 21 million (65%) [internetlivestats.com]
China: 721 million (52%) [internetlivestats.com]
Of course it might not be entirely free Internet, but no modern nation can really afford to go without it these days. It's mostly North Korea and a bunch of countries in Africa that compete to be the world's poorest countries that lack it. Authoritarian regimes manage to control it just fine, if you are the law and don't have to worry about constitutions or civil rights or whatever you just put up the Great Fi
Pretty much (Score:5, Insightful)
People who think that the really poor need Internet need to go see what "really poor" is actually like in the world. That is what happened with the Gates Foundation. Originally they were thinking along the lines of tech for 3rd world countries since both the Gates' are techies. So a perhaps apocryphal story but likely true is that Gates visited an African village and got shown their prized possession: A single light connected to their single power line. He realized then that what these people needed was things like refrigeration, not computers.
If you look at what the foundation does it matches that. While in the US they worry about things like emergency response, global libraries and so on in African they worry about things like agricultural development and vaccination. People don't have time to worry about higher level needs like access to global information if they are dying of disease and starvation. You have to deal with the more fundamental problems first.
A good basic map of this concept is Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. The idea is basically that humans have multiple levels of needs, but not all are equal. We spend our effort meeting the lower level ones and only once they are satisfactorily met do we spend much time on the higher ones.
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Re: Despots Control Those Countries (Score:3)
Other resources like water don't normally compete with Internet access. On the contrary, it can make it easier to get resources like food and water when you are connected.
I went to a talk on villagecell and learned the largest use in developing countries use the Internet for facebook, but internet does opens up trade opportunities with neighboring villages.
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In a lot of poor countries (income less than "$1 a day") it is because the majority of the population is outside the monetary economy. They have food and drink (Water, fruit juice, palm wine, and local gin). However, they have limited means to trade with the neighboring villages let alone the world, so they cannot replace their home, inefficient, farm tools with modern stuff, or buy better seeds and feedstock. They know that the machinery used in Europe or
Re:Despots Control Those Countries (Score:5, Insightful)
Baloney. The 4+ billion people who don't already have internet access are primarily peasant farmers who are struggling to feed themselves
And the Internet would give them access to information that would enable their farms to be more productive, and information that would enable them to understand market pricing so they wouldn't be ripped off by middlemen when they sell their surplus, among many, many other benefits.
much less add anything to their national (or even local) economies.
Increasing the productivity of farms will add to local, and even national, economies.
They don't have the tools or the knowledge nor the willingness to learn anything that would allow them to jump to first-world levels of productivity.
There's no need for them to jump to first-world levels of productivity. Just increasing their own productivity by 20% will make huge differences.
In most places, they have neither reliable electrical power nor reliable potable water, and those folks need clean water a WHOLE lot more than they need internet access.
To get power and clean water, what they mostly need is to increase productivity and therefore income enough that they have the capital needed for those sorts of improvements. The Internet can help them do that.
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Shawn, get your head out of your ass. Most of these poor people we're talking about have no electricity. No electricity means no electronic devices capable of delivering the internet.
I think you should actually learn something about the real situation. It's not true that most of the people we're talking about have no electricity. Most of them have very limited access to electricity, generally a generator, probably community-owned. But it's enough to charge a mobile phone... or a dozen. In fact in many remote villages in Africa the primary use of the generator is to charge the village's handful of phones.
You should look into the numerous studies about the (huge!) impact of mobile phone
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Please point us to the website that holds the information that allows farms to be more productive. Do you really think there are some secret farming tricks that you can only access if you have internet access?
Here you go. [lmgtfy.com]
Actually, experience in Africa shows that the most immediate benefit of Internet access to subsistence farmers is actually to improve their market power. Improvements in farming methods are also very valuable, but given the fact that most such farmers never travel more than a few miles from their homes and have very limited access (pre-Internet) to communications infrastructure, they're at a severe disadvantage when negotiating with the factors who buy and transport their excess production. A
And 90% of the money will go to top 1%. (Score:1)
In education alone, the gains are huge. (Score:4, Interesting)
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Don't overplay how valuable is internet for... well everything. What has grow more: facebook and similar oceans of idiocy or wikipedia and similar sources of education??
This is basically ad agencies saying that they will get more ad revenue, not the new internauts or the cities/countries/whatever..
The bastards who wrote this report should be forced to live a full year of the worst conditions of those poors, taht way they'll figure how awesome is their idea while dying below the poverty line.
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How to monetize? (Score:3)
6.7*10^12 / 4.1*10^9 = $1,634 per person. There is the incentive. Let's have the UN write each one of them a check for that amount and see what happens.
Or do you prefer to be paternalistic and do it for them? What does it cost to connect people who are not capable of doing it for themselves and who probably tolerate a government that keeps them that way.
All you need... (Score:3)
makes way too many assumptions (Score:4, Insightful)
For real.
Assumptions this "study" makes that are deal killers:
1) The cost of connecting these people will be less than the revenue derived from their inclusion. (If it wasnt... why are we considering extending service to them again? Is it charity? Big business doesnt "do" charity.)
2) Having access to increased information sources will increase the rate that people leave impoverished conditions, and that this is a thing that big business can profit from. (how do you determine this, and even if true, how does increased income equality really translate to increased profits by big business, compared with the same increases their competitors will derive without having to pay for it? I remind you again, big business does not "do" charity.)
3) the increased intrinsic costs of providing data service at discounted prices to these people will be fully predictable, and will not denude the profitability their inclusion in e-commerce will have. (see 1 and 2 above-- again, big business does not "do" charity.)
Basically, the only way anything like this will gain traction is if you can prove this:
Being the first to provide access to these people means exclusive access to their wallets, which have money inside that you can then take, your competitors cannot, and the money you can take will be more than the cost of extending the service. Profit is garanteed.
That is by no means what the reality of this situation is. While all ships rise with a rising tide, the amount you rise compared to your competition is what really matters to big business. They dont want to help their competition rise higher than them, by being the ones who suffer the expense of adding the extra water. Big business does not do charity.
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It may come as a surprise to you, but almost without exception, the "charitable donations" of corporations directly benefit the company in some financial capacity.
Take for instance, an endowment of this nature: The one who stands to benefit from a big increase in total economic activity is NOT any individual multinational corporation, but the world government who's citizens are getting increased service, because it directly adds to their market index rating, making them more important on the global market.
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So, your theory is that we should let the rural poor of Africa and India suffer for a couple more generations rather than let whatsisname make a few billion extra?
Yeppers, we need more humanitarians like you. By the by, where I come from, we call that "cutting off your nose to spite your face"....
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I see that you are confused.
I was pointing out that what corporations do is NOT charity.
I was ***NOT*** stating that actual charity is bad.
Nice to see that you have some pent up vitriol, but you are unloading on the wrong person.
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Uh, there's two unrelated bits to this:
a) Would connecting these people to the Internet increase the world's GDP by $6.7 trillion
b) Who'd pay for it and who'd profit from it
The former is certainly possible, around here we can feed the whole population with like 2% working in agriculture while the rest do more valuable things. Surely the poor countries of the world could advance, produce more and become more efficient through trade. It doesn't happen today because they don't have any valuable skills to trade
55% of all statistics are made up (Score:3)
If just 10 people connected via Comcast... (Score:2)
There'd be about $6.8 Billioin added to the [s]global[/s] Comcast economy in user fees, overages, equipment rentals, etc.
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You want to remove useful content from Facebook, well job done, no need for you devious plan.
86.2 trillion.. (Score:1)
........ and would also cost $86.2 Trillion dollars due to online theft, scams, piracy and infrastructure upgrades.
Whaaat (Score:3)
I thought all of these pie-in-the-sky, bubble-creating dot-commies had been effectively filtered out of the market by now.
Some comment below actually says that if you give the internet to some person who lives without electricity, clean water, food, literacy or rights, that the person will somehow be able to use it to obtain the clean water.
I mean, I guess it makes sense in a way: there's a new generation who did not already live through that awkward phase when the internet was the magical "information superhighway" that was going to transport perfection into everyone's life. You can't blame them for not knowing better when crooked corporate scammers pitch them that idea like it's fresh.
Actually - spot on (Score:2)
Everyone who knows anything knows that the community is the value. Get everyone on the internet, value is automatically created.
The only problem is 1 of those billions of people would probably share a song illegally on a p2p network and would owe 75 trillion dollars, leaving us like 68 trillion in the red.
http://www.pcworld.com/article... [pcworld.com]
Global economic output? (Score:3)
Does that even mean anything?
How about looking at global income distribution, poverty levels, death rates and death causes, access to education and health care, ...
I'm wondering (Score:4, Interesting)
1. Do the connectees have control over how and when they are connected and to what subset of "services"? Or is that up to solely the connectors (sometimes a.k.a. Big Brother)?
2. Will those 6.7 billion USD be received by the connectees, the connectors, or the advertisers?
Sounds like the same RIAA numbers for piracy (Score:1)
Extrapolating stuff like this always cracks me up. Hooking up a bunch of illiterate villagers in middle of nowhere Africa will not magically make $6.7 trillion appear out of nowhere. For that amount to be realized, these people need education, changes in culture, elimination of corruption,clean water, sanitation, better all round infrastructure, better access to food, and improvements to healthcare.
Until that happens they'll most likely play Angry Birds instead of start the next wall street tech fad.
How does reading yellow press help? (Score:1)
The article seems to have big assumptions. How would internet access improve anything, since most people on the internet are just idling / chatting / reading freebie news... I don't think this is useful activity at all, so it might not be as useful as they have calculated.
Report "prepared for Facebook" (Score:2)
Yeah, but... (Score:2)
Growth growth growth! Money money money!
Until the robots pull their shiny metal socks up and get their act together, someone still has to be down at the bottom of the ladder unblocking toilets.
Yes, but (Score:2)
... the downside is that the music industry would lose a few quadrillion dollars in sales due to piracy.
And.... (Score:2)
Cost 7 trillion dollars
Output = Input (Score:1)
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Who exactly gets the trillions[?]/p>
Zucherberg, Gates, Nadella, Page, Brin, Cook, Greenspan, ..... do I need to go on?
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Yes, but that doesn't simply translate into Kazakhstan currency. You can get it that cheap because you have that many US dollars to fuck around with. I'm sure it's hard to get your head above the wealth gap and actually afford that luxury if your class of lifestyle is solely dictated by your meagerly wages in Kazakhstani Tenge (US$0.0030).