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Internet access in rich economies is reaching saturation levels
but 90 percent of people in the 48 poorest countries have none,
its report said.
The access growth rate is expected to slow to 8.1 percent this
year, down from 8.6 percent in 2014. Until 2012, growth rates
had been in double digits for years.
"We have reached a transition point in the growth of the
Internet," the report said.
The commission, set up in 2010 by the International
Telecommunication Union and UNESCO, the U.N. scientific and
cultural agency, said the milestone of four billion Internet
users was unlikely to be passed before 2020.
It said growth in Facebook <FB.O> subscribers was outpacing
growth in the Internet.
"Over half the world’s population – some 57 percent, or
more than 4 billion people - still do not use the Internet
regularly or actively," the report said.
It blamed the cost of extending last-mile infrastructure to
rural and remote customers, and a sharp slowdown in the growth
of mobile cellular subscriptions globally.
By the end of this year, 3.2 billion people will have some form
of regular access to the Internet, up from 2.9 billion in 2014.
That is 43.4 percent of the world’s population, still far short
of a U.N. target of 60 percent by 2020.
Women in poorer countries were particularly disadvantaged, the
report said. In the developing world, 25 percent fewer women
than men had Internet access, a number that rises to 50 percent
in parts of sub-Saharan Africa.
Only about 5 percent of the world's estimated 7,100 languages
were represented on the Internet, the report said. Many Internet
users could not understand Latin script, so even reading domain
names was a challenge, it added.
(Reporting by Tom Miles; editing by Andrew Roche)
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