Facebook CEO touts Internet.org progress, trumpets success of free tier of service

A year after asking mobile operators to support Facebook's Internet.org effort, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg returned to the Mobile World Congress keynote stage to tout the success of the program and to reiterate his call for more operators to participate. He also made a point of praising wireless operators' work in connecting new users to the Internet, noting that "it's really important not to lose sight of the fact that it's the operators that are driving this....The real work happens here."

He explained that wireless operators invest billions of dollars acquiring spectrum and building out networks. He described efforts by Facebook to deploy Internet services to new areas using drones and lasers as merely experimental and not a challenge to operators. "I think that that's on the fringe of what's actually going on," he said. Further, Zuckerberg acknowledged that both Facebook and wireless carriers need to be profitable for the Intenet.org initiative to succeed. "We realize that this needs to be sustainable," he said. "We're aware of that and want to be a good partner."