Skip to main content

Google partners with tech rivals to bring affordable internet to developing nations

Google partners with tech rivals to bring affordable internet to developing nations

/

Microsoft, Facebook, and others join forces to promote policy reform

Share this story

alliance for affordable internet
alliance for affordable internet

Some of the biggest names in tech are banding together to help bring affordable internet access across the globe. Tech giants including Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, and Intel are launching the Alliance for Affordable Internet, a group — also composed of government agencies and aid organizations — that hopes to help the United Nations' Broadband Commission meet one of its most ambitious goals: seeing internet become accessible throughout all developing nations by 2015, while costing no more than 5 percent of their respective citizens' average monthly income.

Google appears to have the largest investment in the group out of any tech company, marking yet another extension of its goal to spread internet access. It's already attempted to tackle the issue through new technologies — including utilizing unused wireless spectrum and beaming internet down from balloons — but the Alliance hopes to make it happen in a different manner: through promoting legal policies that should foster better access. "No single solution can connect the 5 billion people living without internet access today," Google writes in a blog post today. Though Google's efforts in spreading affordable internet have by no means been an unqualified success, it's clear that the company is quite serious about getting there.