The Internet Society launched a Research Grant Program in 2025 offering awards of up to US$500,000 per project to fund researchers and institutions worldwide who study gaps in internet access and related policy and technology solutions.
The move arrives against a stark baseline: about 2.2 billion people remain offline in 2025, and 96 percent of them live in low- and middle-income countries. Mobile broadband is still unaffordable in roughly 60 percent of those low- and middle-income countries, a figure the grant program is explicitly designed to help address through new evidence and open findings.
The program is open to individual researchers and organizations worldwide and welcomes applications in English, French and Spanish. Applicants from underrepresented groups and from what the program calls the Global Majority are strongly encouraged to apply. The stated aim is to generate practical, open knowledge that can inform public policy, industry decisions and technology development.
Grant proposals are being sought on a narrow set of priorities: inclusive internet access, the environmental impact of digital infrastructure, frameworks for measuring meaningful connectivity, and ensuring a trustworthy internet. The combination of generous awards — up to US$500,000 per project — and an explicit focus on usable research marks the program as an effort to tie academic and technical work directly to decision-making.
Those numbers matter because they set the scale of the problem the grants aim to influence. Two point two billion people offline is not an abstract statistic; it is the pool of users missing from markets, public services and civic conversation. That 96 percent concentration in low- and middle-income countries points to a concentrated policy and investment challenge rather than a diffuse global shortfall. And the widespread unaffordability of mobile broadband in roughly 60 percent of those countries means that connectivity solutions must clear an economic barrier as much as a technical one.
Contextually, this program sits where research meets implementation: its deliverables are meant to be open and practical, not purely theoretical. By funding studies that can be used by regulators, companies and technologists, the Internet Society is betting that evidence can change the incentives that shape pricing, spectrum policy, infrastructure siting and product design. The program’s multilingual application process and encouragement of underrepresented applicants are designed to broaden whose questions get asked and whose solutions are tested.
The tension is plain. A grant program can create new knowledge and proposals, but it cannot by itself make broadband cheaper or force infrastructure providers to build more capacity. Two point two billion people remaining offline and persistent affordability gaps underline a gap between research and on-the-ground change: research can inform policy and industry, but those actors must act. The program’s emphasis on practical, open outputs acknowledges that gap while also exposing the limits of what money for research alone can achieve.
Where this matters now is in how funders and applicants frame projects. The most consequential tests will be whether funded work produces scalable approaches to affordability and access in the markets where 96 percent of the offline live, and whether those approaches are adopted by policymakers, regulators or companies that control pricing and infrastructure choices. Likewise, research into the environmental footprint of digital infrastructure and better methods for measuring meaningful connectivity could change standards and investment criteria — but only if the findings are translated into policy and market terms.
The Internet Society’s Research Grant Program changes the terms of the debate by putting significant sums on the table and by asking for work explicitly oriented to policy, industry decision-making and technology change. The single measure by which the program will be judged is simple: will its funded research lead to practical, adoptable steps that reduce the number of people who remain offline and lower the affordability barriers that now exist in roughly 60 percent of low- and middle-income countries?
