In April 2014, USAID launched the US Global Development Lab. It aims to accelerate financial inclusion, improve transparency, and unlock new markets. But the digital revolution delivers more than just economic efficiencies. It empowers voices, advances dignity, and, perhaps most importantly, it builds the capacity of individuals to lift themselves—and future generations—out of poverty. A vital part of creating a digitally inclusive world, will be enabling the creation of local content. As a consequence, USAID recently brought together a range of thought leaders to explore this issue in the latest edition of the MIT Press’s Innovations journal.

GSMA and Mozilla have launched a partnership focused on addressing the gap of locally relevant content that can be accessed through mobile. One of the most important trends currently impacting on our industry is the rapid shift from feature phones to smartphones, something that is now underway even in the world’s less economically developed regions. Towards the end of 2013, mobile broadband connections in the developing world passed 1 billion. By 2017, operators will have enabled 3 billion connections, half of which will be smartphone connections. This means that mobile technology will enable billions to join the internet age, with all its benefits, in the near future. However, as an industry, it is now appropriate to ask about the kind of internet they will find when they get there. Even if we are able to solve key issues like access, affordability, and efficiency, what will our subscribers find when they get online? Will it interest them? Will it improve their lives? Will they be able to help shape the Internet to ensure that it does?

In emerging markets, the smartphone penetration rate stands at about 10 percent, which means that now is the time to create the foundational content that will enable a fruitful exploration phase for newcomers. We have time, but there is also some urgency, because if people’s first contact with the Internet offers little value beyond unaffordable consumption, we risk a massive retreat—by users, funders, companies, and governments—from the inherent opportunities. We are prepared to use this window of time to build content that demonstrates value as access increases.

At present, we worry that the next billion Internet users will have little to do but post on social networks and consume media using the apps, services, and platforms created by a few big players. While these services are an important part of bringing people online, it is also important that they are able to find content that they are able to understand, that is relevant and that brings value to them.  An example of this is that India, one of the most significant markets in the developing world, there are only two fully Indian representatives: the India Times newspaper and the mobile shopping site Flipkart, with the rest Indian versions of Google properties, Facebook, Yahoo, and Wikipedia. Similar trends are found across the globe, with the exception of China, which has enough critical mass to develop its own popular in-country online brands. Critically, at present, the majority of the web (around 55%) is in English, a language that the majority of those coming online do not speak.

The danger is that we will end up with a more broadly connected but less empowered Web citizenry. Even if operators invest in network capacity, and even if handset costs will continue to drop, the next billion users will find a less welcoming content landscape, which is effectively closed to their contributions except for a handful of private content silos. The long-term impact of that could include delayed adoption of smartphones, meaning the potential benefits of a connected planet for individual and industry alike, will not be realised.

What can we do to support the creation of vibrant local content among people now coming online via smartphones? The best period to study to determine this is the first wave of Internet content creation, in the era of the desktop web. As the web took shape in North America and Europe in the 1990s, three key factors fueled the growth of content and services from a wide range of small and localized players:

• Building blocks. It was easy to create content and services (with open standards such as HTML and easy tools such as Microsoft FrontPage).
• Skills. People understood and seized opportunities on the Internet (such as creating a web page) and quickly developed the necessary skills, both hard (markup, setting up a website, etc.) and soft (understanding links, how to make money with SEO, etc.).
• Open platform. There was easy access to markets and few real web gatekeepers. In the 1990s and early 2000s, small businesses rushed to create their own web presence by building individual sites. Internet service providers welcomed new customers with low-cost   offerings. Brand new web-based business models quickly emerged as well, including various forms of advertising and online commerce. Capital was made available to enterprises with the potential to scale. The result in the decade or so since has been a hugely prosperous digital economy that has made so many aspects of our lives easier, while also creating wealth and opportunity for people able to grasp the potential of digital tools.

A reasonable theory is that learning the lessons from this period is one way of helping to unlock more opportunity for those now coming online through mobile. Consequently, the GSMA are now commencing work with Mozilla to think about how we can test this theory. We are now working on a number of initiatives related to the above three areas. We are also working with our partners across the industry to build the core components of a user-driven mobile Internet to test these components and deploy them with mobile operators around the world.