Google, Facebook Back Effort to Make Internet Affordable for All

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Several of the biggest names in tech have signed on to a new initiative to bring down Internet costs in the developing world.

Google has partnered with the U.S. Agency for International Development and the UK Department of International Development to create a new coalition called the Alliance for Affordable Internet. The group, which officially launched Monday, includes more than 30 members including Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo and Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web.

At the moment, the organization says that 91% of the 1.1 billion households in the world without Internet are in the developing world. The reason, according to the group, is that broadband prices remain prohibitively expensive in these regions: In developed countries, broadband costs about 1.7% of average monthly incomes as of 2012; in developing countries it costs 30.1%. To change that, the Alliance plans to help push the cost of Internet access down to less than 5% of monthly incomes worldwide. Read more…

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