Is Zuckerbergâ€™s Internet mission too self-serving?

Granting Internet access to the 5 billion people worldwide who currently lack it is a moral imperative, but Mark Zuckerberg is not the right person for the job.

The Facebook CEO and founder gained gushing praise when he announced the formation of a business coalition to bring mobile Internet access to underdeveloped areas earlier this week. Zuckerberg posted a lengthy position paper late Tuesday declaring Internet access a fundamental human right as he announced the partnership, dubbed Internet.org, with Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung and the chipmaker Qualcomm. The group will focus on researching ways to make data cheaper and bring mobile technology to underserved parts of the world.

The problem is that Zuckerberg wants to be Bill Gates both during and after Microsoft. He wants to run the most powerful social networking platform on Earth and simultaneously become the world's foremost humanitarian. But he can't do both at once. Not credibly, at least. His position paper makes this all too clear. In it, Zuckerberg admits that Facebook has nearly reached its saturation point in the Western world, noting that fact was what sparked this quest. There are too few customers left. If he wants more, he has to create them.

The most eyebrow-raising part of Zuckerberg's white paper is a hypothetical he poses. He posits, without evidence, that if you asked people who have grown up in an undeveloped area whether they want a data plan, they won't know what a data plan is. But, he says, if you ask those same people whether they want Facebook access, "they're more likely to say yes."

He's not so much advocating for pure Internet access as he is saying that Facebook is to be the Internet. He undercuts his entire argument with these hints of indoctrination.

Zuckerberg's plan currently focuses on the mobile space. Think smartphones and tablets. It's no coincidence that this same area is where Facebook is most focused.

Zuckerberg is a noted philanthropist, as anyone worth $16 billion should be. He doesn't have bad intentions. But he suffers from a conflict of interest, and a bit of cluelessness. He has no idea what it took, for instance, for the One Laptop Per Child program to distribute Motorola Xoom tablets to 20 children in a remote village of Ethiopia. The day that Mark Zuckerberg travels from village to village and mudhut to mudhut interviewing parents and children with a translator, as OLPC did for weeks, is the day he'll start to be a real player in one of the most important humanitarian causes of our time.