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Connecting Everyone To Internet 'Would Add $6.7 Trillion To Global Economy' (theguardian.com)
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.
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.
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.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
bullshit!!!!!!!!!
what is wrong with this place.
No nerd would do anything but laugh at that headline.
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.
Only if you count Nigerian 419 scams as part of the global economy...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
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?
Congratulations! /s
Don't underplay how valuable the Internet is for education! For the extra education alone, the internet would be vital in places where people might not get a great primary education. If you could buy everyone on earth an encyclopedia set, we'd do it. Well the Internet is much more valuable than that thousands of times over.
God spoke to me
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.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
All you need to accomplish it is to pay PriceWaterhouseCoopers $10 billion to manage the project. A small pittance! And you get $6.7 TRILLION back! Sounds like one of those Nigerian scams to me.
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.
That's a fact!
There'd be about $6.8 Billioin added to the [s]global[/s] Comcast economy in user fees, overages, equipment rentals, etc.
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.
........ and would also cost $86.2 Trillion dollars due to online theft, scams, piracy and infrastructure upgrades.
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.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
You want to remove useful content from Facebook, well job done, no need for you devious plan.
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...
put the pedal to the medal
to the metal.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
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 little long term benefit because of the general culture poverty brings about.
Internet access is one of the few things that can bring these people into contact with other ways of understanding the world than what the people around them tell them ("it is the conspiracy that made us poor. Not waste seeds by putting them in the ground - eat them while they are still edible").
This is just as true amongst poor communities in the developed world as anywhere else.
As for advertisers targetting this segment, you can bet the ocada drivers are on to this one: http://techloy.com/2013/01/30/angry-nigerian-game/
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
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 have two questions on my mind (that don't necessarily get answered by the article, or not in a credible fashion):
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?
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
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.
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.
Who exactly gets the trillions[?]/p>
Zucherberg, Gates, Nadella, Page, Brin, Cook, Greenspan, ..... do I need to go on?
Man that's a lot of extra Nigerian scams.
Damn, you've blown it. That is where the $6.7 trillion was coming from.
That's really all you need to know about this click bait.
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.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
... the downside is that the music industry would lose a few quadrillion dollars in sales due to piracy.
Log in or piss off.
Cost 7 trillion dollars
So this accompanies either: 1) a $6.7 Trillion increase in wages, 2) a $6.7 Trillion increase in US Treasury deficit, 3) a $6.7 Trillion increase in (obviously unpayable) debt or 4) some combination of the above... ... to be mathematically possible. 1 is stable, 2 is impossible because the treasury can't give money to foreigners to fund their internet habits, and 3 is obviously unstable.
But it's sure this money will come from the poor and go to the rich.
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.
So this is just another scheme for wealth transfer from poor to rich.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
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).
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee