With Free Basics, we are letting developers offer zero-rated services: Zuckerberg
AB Wire
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg addressed students at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Delhi during a Townhall meeting on October 28. In an hour-long session, Zuckerberg, who was in his traditional gray T-shirt, answered several questions.
He began his talk by saying, “Townhall QnA is an important way in how we run the company. People can raise any questions they want. It is a good opportunity for me to know what the community wants. India has 130 million Facebook users. It is really important to hear from all of you and what you are thinking about”.
Here are the highlights from the Q&A session. You can go through a detailed live coverage from FirstPost.
Q: Why are you showing so much interest in India?
A: India is the world’s largest democracy. If we have a mission to connect everyone in the world, you can’t do that without connecting people in India. India has 130 million Facebook users. We take this responsibility very seriously. Getting feedback from people here is important for us. The second part is that there are millions of people in India who do not have access to Internet. Those who have access to it, start taking it for granted.
Q: How do you expect to connect people who have no access to Internet?
A: This is an important question. How do you get a billion people on to the internet? Internet.org is a program to spread internet connectivity. It is live in 24 countries. There are 15 million people in the world who have access to the internet, who wouldn’t have had it otherwise. I have seen some cynical reporting saying that this is not a good program. If this isn’t a good program, I don’t know what is. We have noticed that when you give people free Internet, the growth rate for Internet is twice as much as it was before. It prods people to get on to the Internet.
Q: How can I stop getting Candy Crush invitations?
A: This is where the Townhall QnA’s are useful. I sent a message to the person who is in the developer team to get rid of this issue. There are some tools that are outdated which let people send people invites. We hadn’t prioritized shutting it down. But we are doing it now.
Q: Occulus Rift – Are you guys planning to integrate that in social media? How can a developer take advantage of that?
A: We have dev kits for Oculus which cost a few 100 dollars. So you can buy that and work on it.
Q: Facebook has opened an AI lab in Paris. What are the future products we can expect in AI from Facebook?
A: Artificial Intelligence is important. In 5 years, we want to build a computer system that is intelligent which can translate language better, see better, make connections between things better. For a long time we have been able to build computers that can do specific tasks better than people, but there is a lot of scope for improvement. There will be more increase in intelligence in the way we do things.
One, we take accessibility features in Facebook very seriously. In case you are blind and can’t see the photo – so our AI can see the photo and read out the caption and describe the photo for the visually impaired. That is the type of thing I am excited about.
Two, I talked about safety check. You can mark yourself or your friends as safe. In the future with the help of satellites, you can identify who is in an area, who is safe, who needs help.
Q: If Mark is gifted a supernatural power from some aliens, what would those be?
A: That’s a good question. What we are working with Oculus is that we are allowing people to teleport. People can be in completely different place but teleport and come together for an experience. Soon, you’ll be able to put on a headset and go anywhere in the world and that’ll be – pretty good.
Q: Internet.Org is a great initiative, but there have been many questions about net neutrality. I want to ask does Internet.org support net neutrality fully?
A: Yeah Absolutely! Net Neutrality is an important principle and we are doing a lot to push it. We are building an open platform on which any developer can build on. In terms of regulation, countries are just going around and figuring out what their regulations must be. In the US there are pretty strong rules regarding net neutrality. We are generally supportive of that.
There have been a lot of stories here in India that state that Internet.org is a limited internet. This isn’t the truth. The operators have spent billions of dollars on the infrastructure and so you cannot get the complete internet for free. So with Free Basics, we are letting developers offer zero-rated services.
So if you are someone who is trying to watch some videos on YouTube and if the operator charges you more, then that’s bad – that is a violation of Net Neutrality. Some of the people advocating net neutrality say that there should be no zero rated Internet. Zero Rating is important to ensure that more people get on to the internet. In the US, zero-rating is not blocked. Just this week EU released new rules on Net Neutrality and Zero Rating rules.
We lobby for Net Neutrality. We should all make sure that we continue to push for access that is important. Most of the folks pushing for net neutrality have access to the internet. But the people, who are not yet on the internet, cannot sign an online petition. This is a key point. We all have a moral responsibility for people who do not have access to Internet. We should not end up hurting people who do not have access to the Internet.
Q: What was your Eureka moment when you founded Facebook? What is your driving force? Also how can Facebook help with healthcare?
Media tries to romanticize the Eureka moment, but that is not so. I used to build a lot of things in school, but I never had a revelation that Facebook would be so big. You start off building something your care about.
Live: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s Townhall https://t.co/y8iOCG8Zv3 @iitdelhi @EDCIITD pic.twitter.com/qm7uQNlCnl
— pixr8 (@pixr8) October 28, 2015
Q: Considering the startup buzz nowadays, what according to you are the elements of an ideal startup?
If you decide to start a company and just start hiring people, then you lose flexibility. If you decide to turn it into a company only after you have realized what’s working, then those companies will have a lot more flexibility and will work.
We did not have any engineers or servers or anything of that sort. At each step along the way, we just kept doing the next best thing.
Q: Could you share some anecdotes from life when you were down or de-motivated, what would you do?
There isn’t just one single person behind big companies. Companies that get started with more co-founders tend to be more successful. There is no way that only one person can overcome every issue that comes up. You need to have a strong team to power through.
Facebook exists not because we didn’t make mistakes, but because we are doing something important: Mark Zuckerberg https://t.co/PZO51Jiegy
— NDTV (@ndtv) October 28, 2015
Q: Can we do something about missing people – notifications about missing people?
A: There is a program in the US and Canada, where if the children are missing in an area we put the child’s face in your Newsfeed. We launched it January this year in the US, and one child has been found so far. We need to work with governments to bring this out in more places. When you have such a big community, you need to take advantage of that.