Mark Zuckerberg Keynote at MWC 2014 Transcript (Full)

Already almost half a billion people love using WhatsApp for messaging and it’s the most engaging app that we’ve ever seen exist on mobile by far. About 70% of people who use WhatsApp use it every day, which kind of blows away everything else that’s out there.

What we see is that WhatsApp is on a path to connecting more than a billion people and there are very few services in the world that can reach that level and they are all incredibly valuable. So we he had the opportunity to be a part of this journey, I was really just excited to take you up on that and to help him realize his dream of connecting a lot more people.

David Kirkpatrick – Founder and CEO of Techonomy

Jan Koum was the CEO of WhatsApp?

Mark Zuckerberg – Founder, Facebook

Yes, exactly. In terms of fit for Facebook, when Jan Koum and I first met and started talking about this, we really started talking about what it was going to be like to connect everyone in the world, right? And a lot of – this is the vision for internet.org and that’s what I really want to take the time to focus on today. And it wasn’t really until we got aligned on that vision between Facebook and WhatsApp that we actually started talking about numbers and decided to make a deal. But it’s that vision that I think makes the company such a great fit and it’s the shared kind of goal to help connect everyone in the world.

And today what I really want to focus on is Internet.org and how we can build this model for this industry that can deliver the internet to, 5, 6, ultimately, everyone in the world and in doing so, build what is going to be a profitable model – a more profitable model with more subscribers for carriers and get everybody on the internet in a much shorter period of time and hopefully that video that you were showing upfront said that we were going to [protect] another billion people by 2020. I hope we can do a lot better than that.

David Kirkpatrick – Founder and CEO of Techonomy

Well, yes, I know you were planning to come here long before you bought WhatsApp but what you’re saying is the thing that toured you away from the geeks you most love to hang out with in Silicon Valley was this Internet.org vision. So tell us why is Internet.org so important to Facebook and what does it mean to the audience at Mobile World Congress? What led you to do it and why are you here to talk about it?

Mark Zuckerberg – Founder, Facebook

Well, one thing that I think it’s easy to take for granted is that most people in the world don’t have access to the internet at all. It’s only about a third of people have any access to the internet. It’s about 2.7 billion people today and it’s actually growing way slower than you would imagine. People often talk about how there are 5 billion phones in the world and that’s pretty quickly transitioning, that in 5 or 10 years most of those will be upgraded to smartphones and that kind of carries this implicit assumption that as that happens, people are going to have access to the internet.

But that’s actually just not true. The most expensive part about owning a smartphone and being connected to the internet isn’t the smartphone, it’s the data connection. If you’re owning an iPhone for 2 years costs about $2000 in the US and about $500 of that is the phone and $1500 is the data plan. So we’re really not on a path to connect everyone unless something pretty dramatic changes and that’s something that after Facebook reached its milestone of helping to connect 1 billion people we took a step back, and like what problem in the world can we try to help solve next and you know we didn’t come here to — our vision isn’t to try to connect one-seventh of the world, it’s to try to connect everyone and in order to do that we need to form these partnerships because no one company can change the way that the internet works by itself.

So it’s a really important problem, right? The reason that I care about it is it’s not that connectivity by itself, is an end in itself, it’s the things the conductivity brings. When you have access to the internet you have — a lot of people for the first time will have access to things like basic financial services, they can get credit to start a business or get home or access to basic health information, so they can understand conditions that their family might have or help bring their children up more healthily, access to basic education materials. I mean there is this Deloitte study that just came out, I think was today or yesterday that showed that if you increase the number of people in emerging markets that have access internet you could easily create more than a hundred million jobs and bring that many people or more out of poverty and you could decrease the child mortality rate by up to 7% and save millions of lives by giving people access to that information. So we think it’s just this really important problem to work on.

David Kirkpatrick – Founder and CEO of Techonomy

So talk about what exactly is Internet.org?

Mark Zuckerberg – Founder, Facebook

So it’s a partnership and it’s a industry coalition that’s working together to build, to make delivering the internet all the different parts of it, more efficient and to make it so that everyone in the world can have access to some basic services on the internet for either really affordable price or free is the real goal for basic services and we think that we can do this in a way that gets people access to some basic services while increasing the overall number of subscribers and profits for the overall industries that people can invest more and building up this infrastructure even more.

The thing that I think a lot of people miss is more than 80% of people in the world actually already live in an area where there is 2G or 3G access. So sometimes people talk about stuff like satellites or balloons – like this piece of technology to be able to connect everyone and it’s true that that’s going to be necessary for the last few percent of people who live in really rural areas, where this infrastructure doesn’t exist. But for the rest of people, the things that are – that if you don’t have internet for the next few billion, there are really only a couple of reasons why.

One is affordability, which actually isn’t even necessarily the main reason, because most of the next few billion people actually have a few dollars that they can spend on this. The much bigger question is why they should spend their one, or two, or three dollars like that it would take to get basic data access on this. And if you didn’t grow up with access to the Internet, then you may not know the answer to why you would want a data plan. So we’re kind of –

David Kirkpatrick – Founder and CEO of Techonomy

They even don’t know why they would want the internet.

Mark Zuckerberg – Founder, Facebook

Yes, and you’re kind of caught in this Catch 22 where you don’t necessarily have a lot of money, you have enough that if you wanted, you could buy an Internet data plan. But you don’t know what you would get with that and because you’ve never had access to that. So a lot of the goal that we have internet.org is to create a sort of on-ground for the Internet. And one of the models that we have is with a fixed-line phone you can pick up the phone and in the US that we used to dial 911 and you can get free access to some basic services. So if there’s a health emergency you can always get help. If there’s a fire you can get help, if there is a crime you can get help.

And we want to create a similar kind of dial tone for the internet. So the idea is that there is a set of basic services that we think should exist whether it’s messaging or being able to know what the weather is, or food prices or things that Wikipedia or basic search or basic social networking that I think should be — these basic services that everyone should be able to access. And they have a couple of things in common in all those services.

David Kirkpatrick – Founder and CEO of Techonomy

So it’s like 911 only because the internet has way more potential than just dialing a number on a phone.

Mark Zuckerberg – Founder, Facebook

Yes, so all of these basic services that I just said have a couple of things in common. So the first is that they’re all text-based for the most part, it’s incredibly low bandwidth and cheap to serve and offering them for free or cheap and therefore it’s actually a reasonable business proposition. And

The second is that a lot of them, especially things like messaging and social networking and search are portals to more content. So you’re never going to have things that hi-res video or streaming media, be basic services in a model like this. But a lot of what people do through services like Facebook is discover things like news that they would want to read, or videos that they would want to watch or apps that they would want to download – reasons why you consume more data, that people otherwise wouldn’t know.

So if you have access to these kind of basic services, then that answers this catch-22 question and makes it clear to folks, here’s why it’s completely reasonable and why I should spend my dollar or two on getting a data plan and could fuel more investment in the whole industry to build up more infrastructure and make it so that more folks can get online. And one thing is this isn’t entirely theoretical. We’ve actually been working with a bunch of the partners in Internet.org for the last year building out a lot of infrastructure. And we already have some really promising results on this.

So in the Philippines, for example, we’ve been working with Globe – there you go –

David Kirkpatrick – Founder and CEO of Techonomy

The Globe people over there?

Mark Zuckerberg – Founder, Facebook

Awesome, thank you for your partnership. And what we’ve seen in the Philippines is the number of people who are using Internet and data has doubled. And Globe subscribers have grown by 25%. So it’s a home run, it’s going really well.

David Kirkpatrick – Founder and CEO of Techonomy

What did you do to achieve that?

Mark Zuckerberg – Founder, Facebook

We deliver this product. We’re basically in partnership with them. There is free basic services with upsells —

David Kirkpatrick – Founder and CEO of Techonomy

Using Facebook is free?

Mark Zuckerberg – Founder, Facebook

Yes, we’re starting off with just Facebook and messenger. The next version that we’re going to do is more basic services on top of that. But because Facebook is so much of what people use and so much of the data that, or at least the time that they are spending, once we can make a profitable model that works for folks like Globe and others who we’re working with, then we think it’s going to be a pretty easy problem to solve to add other services like weather or food prices or Wikipedia, or things like that but also don’t consume a lot of data into the model and deliver this whole package. But we want to start with Facebook because we control it and could work on the upsells and side of it better.

Globe isn’t the only company that we’re working with and in parallel, we’ve been working with Tigo and they’ve also seen the number of people who are using data and internet grow by 50% over the course of the partnership. And the number of people who are using data on a daily basis is growing even more and I think what we measured is it’s more than 70%. So it’s really early. I don’t want to say that we have all the answers on this yet but the early results are extremely promising. And that’s what I’m excited to be here and talking about is we’re at a point where I think we’ve kind of proved to ourselves that the model can work and we don’t have a lot of capacity to work with a lot of new companies yet. But what we want to do is try to find maybe three or five more partners who we can work for the next year on to deliver this and deliver the package of kind of all basic services for free is this on-ramp to the internet and then hopefully if we can do that, then we’ll be back here the year after that, the year after that with a program that can work for everyone.

David Kirkpatrick – Founder and CEO of Techonomy

Okay. So the way it works is you give customers who otherwise might not be able to afford it essentially free access to Facebook and other services like Wikipedia, basic search, weather information etc. So how do they make money from that? I mean that sounds like a great thing for people, people would want to use it clearly, I can see why they’d come on board for that. But what’s the long-term promise for the operator, why would they want to partner with you?

Mark Zuckerberg – Founder, Facebook

So it goes back to this question of why do the next two or three billion people who are going to get access to internet, why are they not on the Internet today? It’s not because carriers aren’t in their zones. 80% of people or more live in areas where there is 3G or 2G coverage. The reason why they’re not on is because even though a lot of them have the money to afford it, they don’t know why they would want to get access to it. But people know – there are some services that people know, and people know Facebook, they know WhatsApp. So if you ask someone, do you want a data plan and they might say I don’t know why I would want a data plan or why I should spend my dollar or two of disposable income on that. But if you say, do you want Facebook, then they will say, yeah, I want Facebook I want. Yeah, I want WhatsApp.

So once people have those things for cheap or free, then through those services, they come across all these other things that they want to consume, news, apps, different media and then –

David Kirkpatrick – Founder and CEO of Techonomy

It’s kind of gateway drug –

Mark Zuckerberg – Founder, Facebook

Yeah, we think about it as an on-ramp. And we think it’s sustainable –

David Kirkpatrick – Founder and CEO of Techonomy

I’ve got to an on-ramp than a gateway drug. But the point is that it leads to further consumption.

Mark Zuckerberg – Founder, Facebook

Yeah and the important thing is that it shows people why it’s rational and good for them to spend the limited money that they have on the Internet, which I really believe it is actually a rationale thing for them to do. All the data and studies that we’ve shown, show that it will not only increase their opportunities to find jobs, health and education and all these things that makes the economy better, and if we do this as an industry, it will also for self interest just increase profits of all the different companies that are involved here and allow us to invest more in building out the infrastructure to deliver even better internet to people a lot sooner than we’re on track to as an industry without doing something –

David Kirkpatrick – Founder and CEO of Techonomy

So did you work with Globe suggest that they really make more money as a result of this thing?

Mark Zuckerberg – Founder, Facebook

We are on the way. We have been doing this for only a few months now. I mean that’s kind of I think makes it even more impressive that the number of people using data and the internet in the Philippine has doubled on their network in just I think the three or four months that we have. We’re new breakeven and still have a bit of work to do but we are very early in tuning this and this is a lot of what these partnerships are. But as we want to – we work with folks and early on it starts off and it’s not tuned. And I mean we’re going to spend a little bit more than you’re making upfront. But from what we’ve seen in the rate of improvement we’re highly confident that we’re going to get this to a point where it can be very profitable.

David Kirkpatrick – Founder and CEO of Techonomy

So be more specific of what you want from carriers, because there is nothing if not carriers at Mobile World Congress, so you got the right audience. But what do you want them to do if they were to work with you? What would it be like to work with you and what can you do for them specifically?

Mark Zuckerberg – Founder, Facebook

So right now a lot of what – I just want to do is share the vision and get people starting to think about this. We don’t have capacity to work with a large number of partners at this point. But we want to work with a few more. So maybe three or five more partners to – if the first step was testing just a couple of basic services, then what we want to trial over the next year is the full kind of vision. So all of the different services that we talked about, with all of the different kinds of upsells and things that we think that we have the ability to do if we work with a carrier deeply and plug into their systems deeply to make all these flows really efficient and use all the knowledge that we have about customers that both we and the carrier have. And so we basically – a lot of the arrangements that we’ve with folks and we will test something out for a couple of months at a time.

We’ve been really lucky with some of the partnerships that we have, and I mentioned Globe and Tigo and there are a handful of others that – there have been longer term partnerships that give us the ability to test things. And even if they don’t work in the first month to kind of keep on pushing and getting them to work over a three or five-month period, what we want to do for the next partnerships is kind of have a year-long period where we’re really diving in together with a couple folks to see how far we can push this and make this model work. And my goal would be to show that the model works in full over the next year and then to be back here either next year or the year after with a systematic program that we can roll out to everyone who wants to work with us at that point. But for the next year we’re really just looking to work with maybe three or five companies who are really serious about trying to connect everyone in their country using free basic services.

David Kirkpatrick – Founder and CEO of Techonomy

Okay. If they’re giving free access to Facebook, that’s good for you. Sounds like you could make some good money from that. So is this just the way for Facebook to make more money basically, then, I mean what is the reason why Facebook is doing this?

Mark Zuckerberg – Founder, Facebook

So over the long term I hope but I mean one of the unfair economic realities is that the people of the vast majority of the wealth in the world are the billion people who are already on Facebook. So when I talked about this with my board of directors and I put in, in front of them a budget to spend billions of dollars on trying to get internet.org in this vision to work over the next few years, I mean they rightly asked me, okay well how is this going to be profitable in the near term. And I cannot construct any model that’s going to add up in the near term. Because the ad markets in these countries don’t really exist in a huge way yet that is going to make us be breakeven on this year over any period of time that we typically make investments.

But I believe in this because first of all, this is why I started Facebook.

David Kirkpatrick – Founder and CEO of Techonomy

Like I say you have a long term view —

Mark Zuckerberg – Founder, Facebook

I built the product originally, because I wanted it at Harvard. But I mean the vision was that some day someone should try to help connect everyone in the world and reaching a billion people ourselves was really this moment for us where we took a step back as a company, well, like all right, what are we really here to do. If we can help connect a billion people, are we going to spend the few years getting to 1.1 and 1.2 and 1.3, yeah we will do that. Because we will do that in a way to something else but there’s got to be something bigger and for us it’s really this vision of connecting the world.

When I think about the vision for internet.org even though I think we’re probably going to lose money on this for quite a while, all the different things that we’re doing, the reason why I’m optimistic is just like social networking early on, the reason why we did it even though all these bloggers and folks were saying, oh, this is just a fad or okay, fine, so some people are using this but it’s never going to make money. I never really care about that. I believe that it was just as important thing and I couldn’t connect all the dots going forward, I didn’t know enough about the world or business to do so. But I just felt this is an important thing.

And if we do something that’s good for the world, then eventually we will find a way to benefit from that in some way. And I kind of feel like that around internet.org as well. There’s no clear plan that I can say today, it’s like okay, this is going to be good for Facebook. But I think it’s clearly good for the world and like every metrics of good for the economy and global health, and people in these countries and everything, I think you can see that. And over time I think if we can deliver this, it will probably be good for us over time as well.

David Kirkpatrick – Founder and CEO of Techonomy

Is your board completely cool with that?

Mark Zuckerberg – Founder, Facebook

Yes, because I mean they are on our board, because they believe in our mission.

David Kirkpatrick – Founder and CEO of Techonomy

Okay, good. But you are kind of an unusual company because of scope of your presence globally. I mean I guess it’s an unusual position to be in where if internet access increases you benefit just because such a huge percentage of users of the Internet use your service. So what kind of trajectory would we see this to be on, I mean how long do you think it’ll be before we could potentially – if say everything went right and all the partnerships work and you really got what you wanted, how long before everyone could have basic services, not streaming Netflix but Wikipedia… weather information?

Mark Zuckerberg – Founder, Facebook

What I hope is that we can prove that the model works and then get to a place where we can work with a larger number of carrier partners within the next two or three years. And then after that, that’s when I think a lot of the hard work will actually begin of rolling it out and working with the carriers to do that, which is really when I think you’d start to see many more folks get on the internet. So this is a long term thing for us. I mean this isn’t something where we think we’ll figure something out and then like in six months we’ll start to see Internet numbers grow radically. But I think if we can do this well as an industry, then within five years I certainly hope the number of people that we’re connecting is a lot more than a billion that we put – that someone put in the video that played the record for you when I came up here. I would hope that in the next 10 years we can really make progress of connecting most of the rest of the world whether that’s 2.5 billion or 3 billion people.

David Kirkpatrick – Founder and CEO of Techonomy

Okay. Let’s go back to the subject we started with WhatsApp, because okay, you said it was primarily in order to help fulfill this vision. But you paid $19 billion for it. I guess trying to put myself in the head of your board here, right? They do probably agree with you that long term making the world more connected and open is a great thing. But then there numbers people, a lot of them and that’s a huge investment you’ve just made. And it sounds like the return is very long term. But is it really the right way to think of WhatsApp because it’s not the way it’s been discussed.

Mark Zuckerberg – Founder, Facebook

….valuable, much more valuable than that. So I mean there is a –

David Kirkpatrick – Founder and CEO of Techonomy

And they’re halfway there already?

Mark Zuckerberg – Founder, Facebook

I could be wrong. I mean there is some chance of this is the one service that gets to a billion people and ends up of not being that valuable, I don’t think I am. And you can look at other messaging apps that are out there, whether it’s Cacao or Line or WeChat, that already are monetizing at a level of $2 to $3 per person and with pretty early efforts. And I think that shows that if we can do a pretty good job of helping WhatsApp to grow that this is just going to be a huge business. So even just independently I think it’s quite a good bet.

Now then the question is why were we excited to do this together? So I was excited and Jan was because of the internet.org vision and helping to connect everyone in the world which I think clearly we can do when we get a lot of leverage from working together on that. The other piece is that by being a part of Facebook, it makes if they can focus for the next five years or so purely on connecting more people. If they did this as an independent company, they were going to have to focus at some point more on building out their business model which of course they’re going to do and they already have seeds of that with their subscription model which is very promising. But what Jan is more excited about and frankly what I think is the bigger opportunity is rather than focusing on that for them to go out and connect 1, 2, 3 billion more people in the next – I mean however long that’s going to take, and if we can do that, then I just think we will be well on our way to both realizing this vision of trying to connect everyone and on our way to helping to achieve the internet.org vision. So that’s what we want to focus on.

David Kirkpatrick – Founder and CEO of Techonomy

You also think of messaging as part of the basic services that ought to be available to everybody long before they can download video – that’s just a human [inaudible] issue, something you want to help make happen and also that would benefit Facebook in the long run?

Mark Zuckerberg – Founder, Facebook

Yes, and to be clear, I mean what we envision for carriers is basically a model that can help them get more subscribers and connect more people. It’s going to be up to them to choose which services they want to put in the basic services for free. There are certain things that people really want, if they’re going to want to include in there. But our model and what we’re trying to build is just a proof that building it on ramp is better for the internet and better for our partners. And I think we’re quite on our way to proving that out. And then over time whether people want to include WhatsApp in that or Facebook Messenger or Facebook or whatever the pieces are, I think it’s something that we can work out and something they will have a lot of choice over.

David Kirkpatrick – Founder and CEO of Techonomy

But also it reminds me a little bit of the Open Compute Project you have which is a way of taking software that you’ve developed in your own data centers which are among the largest in the world and making that freely available to the rest of the Internet industry, which is bringing efficiencies to others. So talk about specifically how you’re going to be able to make efficiencies that allow them to make money even though they’re giving away these services for free?

Mark Zuckerberg – Founder, Facebook

So there are 3 pillars that we’re really focused on in terms of efficiency. And the first is kind of just decreasing the overall cost of all of the infrastructure that goes into delivering the internet. The second is decreasing the amount of data that’s used, so that you are not utilizing most of that infrastructure for these basic services. And then the third is increasing the efficiency of all the upsells and things that we can do to increase revenue for folks. And I think that there’s a 10x improvement in each of those and if you compound those together, then that adds to about a 1000x improvement and the affordability of some of these services which I think if we can deliver that, that we will be way on our way to making this model profitable for folks and something that I think folks who are going to use. So I can go through each of those.

David Kirkpatrick – Founder and CEO of Techonomy

So part of it though is also allowing apps like Facebook and other apps that just simply use less data while delivering the same capability – you did that with your own Android app, that did something amazing improvement.

Mark Zuckerberg – Founder, Facebook

Yes. So let me go through all the pillars. So the first one – decreasing the cost of the overall internet. You get things like open compute in there, making it so that the servers and the switches and things that people need that are infrastructure are just cheaper to use by making some of the stuff open source. You get policy work to make it so that you can use different parts of spectrum – the spectrum and licensing fees that carriers have to pay, or less overall there is work that’s going into helping make smartphones cheaper because that’s a big part of the consumer and then cost and all those things are things that are widely going on across the industry.

David Kirkpatrick – Founder and CEO of Techonomy

Mozilla just announced a $25 smartphone capability today – $25?

Mark Zuckerberg – Founder, Facebook

Yeah, it’s awesome. But this is a lot of what we are working with folks like Ericsson and Qualcomm and Samsung and Media Tech who are internet.org partners, founding partners on trying to do. So that’s kind of the delivering the Internet more affordably.

The second pillar is using data more efficiently. And this is where I think we’ve actually almost got all the way there towards the 10X improvement that I was talking about, where a year ago, the basic Facebook app, the average person used about 14 megabytes of data a day.

David Kirkpatrick – Founder and CEO of Techonomy

The global average?

Mark Zuckerberg – Founder, Facebook

Yeah, because we hadn’t optimized – the quality of the photos to be optimal for different folks and just a lot of things that were fairly wasteful. I think we’re already down to around 2 megabytes on that and we have a pretty clear plan to get to 1.

David Kirkpatrick – Founder and CEO of Techonomy

Without changing experience –

Mark Zuckerberg – Founder, Facebook

Yeah, without changing the experience at all. Just kind of optimizing and focusing on this. And then we bought this company Onavo which does client side compression. So it allows a person to route all their Internet traffic through them and make it so that they can save I think in some cases 50% of the data costs go through that, so that doesn’t just apply to Facebook services; that’s everything. And then there are other things like the Snaptu platform that we have for building really efficient low end smartphone and feature phone apps as well that we can use as a platform to allow other apps as well. So that’s going to be a big thing.

Then the third pillar is — we can just increase the amount of upsells through subscriptions that people have when they are using these basic services. And that’s a lot of the work that we’re doing with carrier partners already, and we’ve seen I think maybe even more than a 10X improvement on that piece already. And the thing that’s most promising is that there’s still so much more room there.

David Kirkpatrick – Founder and CEO of Techonomy

Talk more about how that would work though, these upsells. I don’t understand exactly why it means.

Mark Zuckerberg – Founder, Facebook

I mean you’re just making it – so as an example, you’re using your Facebook feed and you come to a link to something that isn’t included in the basic services package and you click on it, and then there’s just a really — there’s a popup that shows up right there that says, okay, if you want to consume this, then you can buy this data plan and you make it one tap because it’s tied directly into the carrier’s systems.

David Kirkpatrick – Founder and CEO of Techonomy

Pay 10 cents to see this video.

Mark Zuckerberg – Founder, Facebook

Yeah, exactly. And the more friction we can take out of that process, the easier it is in the more that people will want to pay, buy data through things like that.

David Kirkpatrick – Founder and CEO of Techonomy

So that’s where the incremental revenue can come, where the savings are coming on the other side because the carriers will be actually delivering less data for the same quality of service. So talk a little bit about this Ericsson lab that you just announced today where you’re going to have a lab on the campus at Facebook in Menlo Park to help other apps do this, right?

Mark Zuckerberg – Founder, Facebook

Yes, so one of the things that we want other developers to do is feel empathy for the high data consumption experiences that they are creating. So we did this Hackathon recently that Ericsson hosted and a bunch of other great companies were there, Spotify, eBay and Twitter and a handful of others were there.

David Kirkpatrick – Founder and CEO of Techonomy

They brought their apps to try them out.

Mark Zuckerberg – Founder, Facebook

Yes. So what Ericsson did was they build this infrastructure that – they brought this infrastructure to make it so that developers can simulate running their apps in all kinds of different conditions. And when you feel that, you really like get this feel for, okay I really need to take a lot of the data used out of this because it’s just un-usable in all these places. And once these people who are running these companies have these first-hand experiences – of experiencing their app in that condition, which a lot of folks in the U.S. in Silicon Valley just have never traveled around and seen apps in those environments, you really come away with empathy for what you’re subjecting the people who you’re supposed to be serving to – like what a bad experience that can be, which really incentivizes you to make it more efficient and drop the amount of data that you are using, which of course saves money all around for consumers and carriers.

David Kirkpatrick – Founder and CEO of Techonomy

I heard that some of your people were in Africa and they went into a store and bought some SIMs and put them on the phone and tried to use Facebook and they found to their shock that it was a much more difficult experience than they expected, is that right?

Mark Zuckerberg – Founder, Facebook

Yeah, we send — we have this rotational product manager program. So a lot of folks who are coming out of college, we don’t assign them to a team. They rotate around the company and just get exposure to different things. And I think we send all of the rotational PMs to an emerging market to feel what Facebook is like there. And they all come back with really interesting stories or things that we’re just absolutely messing up and need to do a better job on in order to deliver this well. But I think it’s like internalizing that empathy — getting that empathy for those experiences in our company I think is what’s going to enable us to really get the push to make these things as efficient as they need to be.

David Kirkpatrick – Founder and CEO of Techonomy

In a way, the role you’re beginning to play is something like a systems integrator for the internet, it’s sort of — the way you’re describing it, I mean, you’re kind of drawing together all these communities. I know you just announced something today in Rwanda where even the government of Rwanda is involved, then you’re helping — Nokia is going to sell especially cheap phones to students so that they can get free access to educational information. Is this a role that you think Facebook will play more and more to be like a convener or systems integrator of all these parties so they can make it happen together?

Mark Zuckerberg – Founder, Facebook

I don’t think Facebook should get that so much credit for that and actually one of the things, that I want to be really clear about — I said this but I don’t think I can make this point strongly enough is Internet.org is this big coalition across the industry. And we’re playing one role in it. I think Facebook has some unique perspective building the most used app in the world and this gives us some position to be able to really understand what we need to do to deliver these things more efficiently. But no one company can do this work by themselves. I mean this is all — it’s a partnership between the folks building infrastructure and the carriers and other developers and governments and public sector, other work in order to deliver this. And it’s going to be all these folks having to come together to make this possible because there is just no way that Facebook could do this by ourselves and I think if we came away today with the feeling that this is somehow like my vision or we were doing this, and that would just be completely wrong.

David Kirkpatrick – Founder and CEO of Techonomy

So the range of partners will grow considerably over –

Mark Zuckerberg – Founder, Facebook

Yeah absolutely.

David Kirkpatrick – Founder and CEO of Techonomy

I got to ask you one thing, because there’s been so much talk about the Snowden revelations and the impact they will have on American Internet companies So you’re one of the premier American Internet companies talking about even more global penetration where in many countries there is concern that the US government has this weird relationship – could this potentially be a problem for this – the success of Facebook in the future overseas, globally generally, not overseas, we’re overseas now?

Mark Zuckerberg – Founder, Facebook

The NSA issues I think are real issues especially for American internet companies. Trust is such an important thing when you’re thinking about using any service where you’re going to share important personal information. And we continue to work to just make sure that we can share everything that the government is asking with us and recently we got the permission to share a lot more of the content in terms of what people are asking which I think was helpful because it showed that the request number in the thousands, not the millions or tens of millions, like I think some people had feared.

For Internet.org I don’t know why that would have a huge impact. I think if anything, my guess is that the issues with the NSA actually have the industry working together better than I’ve ever seen it working together before. We’ve had issues historically working with some of our competitors on policy issues.

David Kirkpatrick – Founder and CEO of Techonomy

Because they are so collectively angry brings you together, is that it?

Mark Zuckerberg – Founder, Facebook

Yeah, I mean what I was going to say was, in the past I think we’ve had issues just because we’ve been competitive aligning on policy issues that even helped the whole industry, things around pushing the internet forward, internet policy issues. But now I think it’s such an important thing because of – just like how extremes some of the NSA revelations were that now I do feel like a lot of the industry is a lot more aligned. And then, being able to work together on things like Internet.org, once you’re already working together on a few other things actually become easier in a lot of ways.

David Kirkpatrick – Founder and CEO of Techonomy

But given the vision you’ve said today that you have about connecting the planet, it must make you pretty angry because certainly the government’s behavior has underlined trust in these American services?

Mark Zuckerberg – Founder, Facebook

Yeah, it’s not awesome. I have talked about this a lot publicly. I don’t have much new to say now. But what I have said is I think that the government kind of blued on this. The governments all have a responsibility to protect folks and to also be transparent about what they’re doing. And I think they’re just way over the line in terms of not being transparent enough about the things that they’re doing. And now I think that they’re getting there because of the pressure and lot of the work that internet companies are doing to push. But they are only now starting to get to the range of where they should have been. And I really think this whole thing could have been avoidable and it would have been a lot better for the internet.

David Kirkpatrick – Founder and CEO of Techonomy

Okay. I think we have time to take a few questions. So we have mike handlers I believe, I can barely see anything out there. But what we’re going to do is take a few questions at once and then Mark is going to answer them. We don’t — I don’t have a timer up here, so I am a little unclear about how much time I have. So any help I can get in that would be useful.

So okay, let’s start right here and if you’d identify yourself and state your question please.

Question-and-answer Session

Question 1: Hi Mark, this is [Mont Giani]; I am from the Bay Area as well. Just a quick question. I love your vision but what is the role of literacy in all this?

Question 2: My name is [Rajat] from the UN Broadband Commission. That is a fantastic idea. I’m hearing on the tone of this conversation there’s a lot of collaborative innovation, collective innovation, but I haven’t heard for you saying it because it sounds like this is going to be really the essence of being able to put this thing together. And in couple of hours as you know, Stephanie Powers, US ambassador to the UN is going to introduce her own Facebook, for reaching out to about a billion or so, I am sure you’re going to be joining her from here. What about the role of the NGOs and the governments being able to participate at this point, making it public-private partnership collaborative innovation?

Question 3: Hi Mark, I’m a journalist from the Netherlands right here. I have a question about WhatsApp. WhatsApp has a lot of contents and data in the messages. Currently not really used, at least not in the way that Facebook uses a lot of those data. Are there any plans to change that is my question?

David Kirkpatrick: Okay. Let’s start with the role of NGOs and governments, because that’s really a key question that I was eager to hear you talk more about anyway.

Mark Zuckerberg: So I think that this is – the Internet is not something that any one company or even one sector of companies organizations works on. And this is going to be something where there are going to be carriers and app developers and infrastructure providers and governments and NGOs and a lot of different types of folks. And Facebook’s role in this is not to – I mean we’re not organizing all the [pair wise] connections between those. I mean a lot of collaboration is going on.

And what we’ve tried to do is help to create this internet.org umbrella framework that aligns the mission and a lot of the work that a lot of these folks were already trying to do and say, okay, these are the companies that are trying to do this work, and I think it’s enabled a lot of different conversations that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.

So one of the things that we see is for folks who are trying to build new kinds of infrastructure, they often need partners to help deploy it and get it out to different places, whether that’s companies or NGOs who are working on that, that I think there is a wide variety of options. And I think that there are a handful of things now. I don’t know what’s public yet. So I probably don’t have – as good of an answer here as I should. But I think there are going to be a number of things pretty soon that show pretty good partnerships that are public-private partnerships.

David Kirkpatrick: Okay. Now lot of people in Northern Europe in particular would ask the kind of question that the Dutch journalist asked about, now that you’re going to own WhatsApp, is your attitude towards its data going to change from the attitude they’ve had historically, the user information, what would you say about that?

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah, the answer is it’s absolutely not going to change. One of the big important pillars of this deal is that WhatsApp is going to continue to operate completely autonomously. They’ll use the services from Facebook whether that’s help scaling in different tools or different infrastructure or help using – that the people at our company to grow different functions within the organization, whatever Jan wants to use, he’ll have the ability to use. But the vision is to keep the service exactly the same. And as you probably know, WhatsApp, not only do they not use any of this content, they don’t even store it.

So if you send a message to someone, that message is deleted from WhatsApp servers almost as soon as it’s delivered to them. So all the photos and things that you’re sending, WhatsApp isn’t even storing, they just are building this infrastructure to deliver it efficiently and reliably and they found that that’s the most important thing is focusing on that efficiency. And that’s the service that people want. So I think we would be pretty silly to get in the way of that.

David Kirkpatrick: Okay. Just quickly the literacy thing, is that something that you care about? Do you think this could really help this initiative?

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah, I think we have a long while to go before we’re running up against people…or photos even if they’re not super high res photos are pretty universal forms of communication, that I think you’re just starting to see more and more even in populations that are highly literate, or what people are using to communicate, because they’re just more efficient a lot of the time.

David Kirkpatrick: Okay, good. We have time for a couple more. All right, well I can see the front really easily. Go ahead.

Question 4: My name is Anish. It is powered by a vision of internet.org. As you think about connecting everyone, really we have to think about countries which have large most of humanity, countries like China and India. So do you have a specific thinking or a strategy towards those big chunks of humanity which is in these countries who may not have access to internet or communication at this point?

Question 5: Hi,Mark. Welcome to Barcelona. My name is Bruno, I am a journalist. I want to ask you, if you’re creating what’s next, what idea do you have right now in your mind that you will put in 2020, let’s say, a Facebook which is going to be the key to help the world to be a better place?

Question 6: Hi, what’s up. This is [Kay Evan from Silicon Carne]. Are you going to do another bid on Snapchat or you have given up on that?

Mark Zuckerberg: India and China. We think that the model that we’re building and working towards here is pretty universal. So I don’t think what we’ve tried to optimize for so far is partners who believe in this and want to work with us on it. Because it will take investment. We’re not going to just turn this on and then in the first month it’s going to be this massively profitable thing. It’s going to take a while to grow the Internet in the country and to then turn the people who are then on the internet into subscribers who are paying. And we think that we can get there but it’s going to take some investments. So what we’ve tried to do is focus on folks who believe in what we’re trying to do and working deeply with those folks.

China is a little challenging for us because we’re not running there. So our ability to work with different folks there is more limited. But again a lot that what internet.org is, just trying to put forward this model for how this can work. And there’s no reason why if we show that this can work in different places, that different companies that are running in China can pick up the ball and run with this there, I would love to see that happen.

David Kirkpatrick: Any comment on Snapchat?

Mark Zuckerberg: No.

David Kirkpatrick: Why I am not surprised. I think –

Mark Zuckerberg: I mean look, once you do — after buying a company for $16 billion, you’re probably done for a while.

David Kirkpatrick: In your case I am not never sure. But okay. Mark, thank you so much for being here. Really good talking to you.

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