The Alliance for Affordable Internet, unveiled Monday in Abuja,...

(created by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife), the U.K. Department for International Development and the U.S. Agency for International Development, said it intends to try to cut online access costs to below 5 percent of monthly income worldwide, a target set by the U.N. Broadband Commission. The alliance includes representatives from industry, governments, academia and civil society, and was initiated by the World Wide Web Foundation, founded by Tim Berners-Lee. A4AI (a4ai.org) wants to persuade governments to base Internet access rules on a series of policy and regulatory best practices, which the coalition posted in September (http://xrl.us/bpxvzr): (1) Liberalized markets with healthy competition, independent regulators and evidence-based policies and regulations that include meaningful public participation, and (2) Policies and practices that encourage lower-cost structure for industry, such as streamlined processes for infrastructure rollout and sharing, effective spectrum management and innovative spectrum usage via unlicensed and opportunistic reuse. The best-practice document also seeks an end to luxury taxation and excessive customs and tariffs on telecom goods and services required for Internet access, such as handsets and set-top boxes. A4AI also wants effective universal service fund administration in countries where such funds exist, and reasonable efforts to systematize the collection of key data indicators to measure effectiveness of Internet access. The coalition said it’s strongly focused on action. A4AI will begin engaging with three or four countries by year’s end, expanding to at least 12 by the end of 2015, it said at the Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation forum in Nigeria. The alliance said it will release an annual “affordability report,” the first of which will be out in December. Other members include Cisco, Facebook, Intel, Microsoft, Yahoo, Consumers International, the Ford Foundation, Internet Society and Software & Information Industry Association. New technologies play a crucial role in bringing Internet access to more people, and Google has invested in many big ideas over the years, such as balloon-powered Internet access, wrote Google Access Principal Jennifer Haroon Monday on the company’s public policy blog (http://bit.ly/GDTsBw). But no single solution can connect the 5 billion people living without online access, she said. “Policy change can help new innovation take hold and flourish; outdated policies can stifle progress.” A4AI Honorary Chairman Bitange Ndemo has called for the need to get rid of “analog policies that are holding back the digital revolution,” Haroon said. “We couldn’t agree more."