Facebook's controversial free internet distribution program, Internet.org, has so far connected 15 million people who would otherwise have been offline, Mark Zuckerberg said in a speech in India.
This number reflects overall data, not just connections made from India, where the number of new users has reached one million – although Internet.org arrived in the country about a year ago.
India currently has 130 million Facebook users, but it is still the country of a billion people living without internet access.
Globally, this number reaches four billion.
Last month, Facebook made some very significant changes to Internet.org, starting with renaming it Free Basics, and opening it up to include more developers and web services.
Zuckerberg said that net neutrality is an important principle at Facebook, and added that half of the people who try the free service end up becoming paid customers.
I'm in India for our Townhall Q&A tomorrow, and I decided to visit the Taj Mahal. I've always wanted to see this. It is…
Posted by Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday, October 27, 2015
On Wednesday, a 7.5 magnitude earthquake struck India, and Facebook allowed more than 1.5 million people to contact their friends and family to see if they were safe.
Finally, Zuckerberg mentioned Facebook's Amber Alert program, which was launched in the US this year to help find missing children. Zuckerberg said that it has already found at least one child and that he will be saying more about the issue to the entire global Facebook community in the near future.
