( CNN ) -- Mark Zuckerberg believes that connectivity is a human right . Or at least that 's how he 's framing his new project , Internet.org , a partnership with leading companies in the smartphone industry to bring Internet access to the developing world . You could be generous and call this enlightened self-interest , but more likely , Internet.org is a canny business move dressed up to sound like charity . In his overly earnest manifesto about the project , Zuckerberg declares , `` For almost ten years , Facebook has been on a mission to make the world more open and connected . For us , that means the entire world â€ ” not just the richest , most developed countries . We 've made good progress , and today we connect more than 1.15 billion people through Facebook each month . But as we started thinking about connecting the next 5 billion people , we realized something important : the vast majority of people in the world do n't have any access to the internet . '' In other words , how do we help these people become our customers ? Companies that support Internet.org include Ericsson , Mediatek , Opera , Samsung , Nokia and Qualcomm . They make their money building smartphones or the systems and services that help them run . Internet.org has a three-part plan for achieving its goal . 1 . Develop cheaper means of access , specifically low-cost smartphones . 2 . Find data efficiencies that will allow services like Facebook to work with less bandwidth . 3 . Create business models that will incentivize companies of all types to provide cheaper , more plentiful Internet access in the targeted regions . While this outline sounds refreshing , the fact is , Facebook and its partners have been pursuing them quite actively already . Internet.org is simply benevolent branding on what these companies were hard at work doing . Samsung and Nokia , for example , have been pushing their way into developing markets with low-cost smartphones . In terms of data efficiency , Facebook has developed two projects , Facebook Zero and Facebook on Every Phone , which allow the social network to run on feature phones with little bandwidth . These apps have propelled Facebook 's recent growth in Africa and Mexico . New business models have emerged in regions like the Philippines , Mexico and Egypt , where Facebook partnered with handset makers and mobile carriers to preload its services onto phones in exchange for incentivizing upgrades and more expensive data plans . Will Zuckerberg 's new initiative operate differently than these existing ventures ? The name certainly implies so . The .org domain it uses in its name is one of the original top-level domains created specifically for nonprofits . Today , it is also used by academic institutions , open-source and community projects , and the philanthropic parts of for-profit corporations . A number of articles mistakenly referred to Internet.org as a nonprofit . It 's easy to see how they were confused . In the opening lines of his essay about the new project , Zuckerberg writes , `` It may not actually be proï¬ .
Mark Zuckerberg is starting an initiative to bring Internet access to developing world . Ben Popper : Internet.org is a canny business move dressed up to sound like charity . He says some people have mistakenly assumed the initiative is a nonprofit , but it 's not . Popper : Zuckerberg interested in potential growth and profits from emerging markets .