A/HRC/28/56 21. Information and communication technologies allow users to communicate with each other and, in particular, to access the Internet. The most significant advance in the Internet is the growth of mobile technologies, which include laptops, tablets and mobile telephones. The latter have gone through major developmental changes since 2.5G phones, which introduced access to the Internet. The advent of 3G and 4G mobile phones has meant that the speed of access to the Internet is almost as fast as traditional Internet technologies. 22. By 2013, the number of Internet users worldwide had risen to 2.8 billion, meaning that nearly 40 per cent of the world’s population had access to the Internet. However, there are significant regional variations in Internet penetration. Europe has a penetration rate of nearly 70 per cent and North America of nearly 85 per cent. Africa has a penetration rate of 21 per cent and Asia of 32 per cent.3 Those figures reflect trends at regional levels but they mask penetration differences within each region. 23. It is estimated that on average one third of children have had access to the Internet in the past five years,4 although that figure masks those countries where child use of Internet is almost universal. In Europe, 70 per cent of children aged 6–17 used the Internet regularly, with some variations among countries.5 In Africa, for the vast majority of children, access is not at home or school but through a cybercafé, 6 although mobile technologies are leading to a change in African use of the Internet.7 Estimates from the Asian region show a wider discrepancy among countries, with Malaysia as an example of a developing economy where the use of new technologies is increasing and China having one of the highest growth rates of technology in the world.8 In Latin America, there is similar discrepancy, which replicates the different economic development of the countries. In general, the youth are leading the emergence of the use of new technologies in developing economies; therefore they are more likely to be leading the way to Internet usage.9 24. The growth in mobile technology has meant that more children have access to personal use of Internet, and that the average time that children are spending on the Internet continues to grow.10 The actual use made of the Internet seems to differ between children. Younger children are less likely to use the social aspect of the Internet and are more likely to use it to access information.11 Older children (aged 14–18) primarily use it as a communication tool and will regularly use social media. 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Internet World Stats, “Internet Usage Statistics: the Internet big picture”. Available from www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm. International Telecommunication Union, Measuring the Information Society (Geneva, 2013), p. 127. Available from www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Documents/publications/mis2013/MIS2013_ without_Annex_4.pdf. Sonia Livingstone and Leslie Haddon, EU Kids Online: final report 2009 (London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)), p. 5. Available from www.lse.ac.uk/media@lse/research/EUKidsOnline/Home.aspx. ECPAT International, Understanding African Children’s Use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) (2013), p. 13. Centre for Justice and Crime Prevention and UNICEF, Connected Dot Com: Young People’s Navigation of Online Risks (2013). Available from www.unicef.org/southafrica/SAF_resources_connecteddotcom.pdf. International Telecommunication Union, Measuring the Information Society, p. 143. Ibid., p. 152. See Uwe Hasebrink, “Children’s changing online experiences in a longitudinal perspective” (LSE, 2014). Available from http://www.lse.ac.uk/media@lse/research/EUKidsOnline/EUKidsOnlinereports.aspx. Bird et al., Children’s rights in the digital age, p. 32. 7