Mark Zuckerberg continues to support net neutrality, or the idea that Internet service providers (ISP) should treat all data on the Internet equally, even as his Internet.org project plans to provide only basic Internet services for free and charge for a data plan with upgraded features.

The Facebook founder and chief's statements comes as an answer to one of the questions fielded to him during a live question-and-answer session conducted on his own Facebook profile page, where he answered several questions from commenters including singer Shakira and Virgin Group founder Richard Branson.

Zuckerberg says he still thinks net neutrality is important to keep ISPs from discriminating against users especially in developed countries where most people already have access to the Internet.

"For people who are not on the Internet though, having some connectivity and some ability to share is always much better than having no ability to connect and share at all," he says. "That's why programs like Internet.org are important and can co-exist with net neutrality regulations."

But Internet.org is not just for people in less developed countries. Zuckerberg says he plans to expand the project to deliver drone-powered Internet to countries in Europe in the future. At first, however, he says Internet.org is prioritizing countries with the most unconnected people.

And he believes, as does Richard Branson, that connecting people online will provide many benefits to those who previously had no access to the Internet, including education, health, information, jobs, and so on. Zuckerberg says it is estimated that for every one billion people that go online, 100 million are taken out of poverty. And he says there are also benefits for the people who are already online.

"Think about how many brilliant entrepreneurs there are out there who have great ideas and the will to change the world, but just lack basic tools to do so," he says. "If you go by the population, almost 2/3 of these entrepreneurs don't have Internet access today. Once they get connected, we may have three times as many good ideas and amazing new services built that will benefit everyone around the world."

Zuckerberg also touts what he calls personalized learning, where students use technology to learn the subjects they are interested in at their own pace. This is in answer to Shakira's question about how disadvantaged communities can use technology for education.

"There are some great new schools experimenting with different personalized learning models and getting great results," says Zuckerberg. "I'm supporting some of those schools through my personal philanthropy, and Facebook is also helping to build open source software to power some of these tools."

On the question whether Facebook hinders face-to-face communication, Zuckerberg says Facebook is meant to help people communicate with those who are not directly around them.

"I can stay in touch with family members who are traveling or friends who live in other countries," he says. "It's great to be able to do that since I wouldn't have good opportunities to stay in touch with those folks otherwise."

Asked what it takes to keep the world's biggest social network, now with more than 1.4 billion users, operational, the Facebook chief says it takes "many terabits per second of bandwidth and many hundreds of thousands of servers." That also includes having Zuckerberg spend 50 to 60 hours a week working in his Palo Alto office, but if it counts the entire time he spends thinking of his mission to "connect the world and serve our community better," he basically spends his whole life on work.

But perhaps Zuckerberg's most clever response of all was the one sent to a Briton who asked for a sarcasm button.

"Sure, we'll get right on that," Zuckerberg says with a smiley.

Photo: Andrew Feinberg | Flickr