Internet Facts for Kids

A Picture of a City Connected by the Internet

This web page contains internet facts for kids and is an excellent resource for anyone of any age looking to learn about the internet and the World Wide Web. Our goal is to provide you with accurate, up to date facts about the internet. In addition to facts about the internet, we provide additional resources to help you with your research on the internet.

The internet facts below will help you learn about who invented the internet, how to the internet works, what are some of the popular protocols on the internet and other internet related facts. We hope these internet facts expand your knowledge of the internet and assist you in learning more about the information super highway.

If any of the below internet facts are inaccurate, please contact us and let us know.

19 Internet Facts for Kids

  1. The internet is a worldwide system of computer networks that are connected using TCP/IP, an internet protocol suite, and connect devices around the globe.
  2. The precursor to the internet was ARPANET, a project by the United States federal government.
  3. The acronym ARPANET stands for Advanced Research Projects Agency Network.
  4. It’s a common misnomer to call the internet the World Wild Web. The World Wide Web, also shortened as WWW, is what people use to connect to and view websites using HTML via HTTP or HTTPS.
  5. You access the internet using an ISP (Internet Service Provider).
  6. HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) and HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) is an application protocol used to view websites on the internet.
  7. The *.com or *.org you see at the end of a website address is called a domain extension.
  8. Some domain extensions are know as country code top-level domains (ccTLD), like *.uk (United Kingdom), *.fr (France) and *.hk (Hong Kong).
  9. An IP address is a number that is assigned to a device accessing the internet. The best way to think of an IP address is to associate it to how a phone number is unique to a person, an IP address is unqiue to a device or network.
  10. In the United States, before highspeed internet was widely available people used modems to connect to the internet. The modem would call your ISP (Internet Service Provider) via your telephone landline.
  11. The fastest a dial-up modem could transfer data was 56,000 bytes per second. Modern day highspeed internet can exceed 1,000 Megabits per second, which is 125,000,000 bytes per second.
  12. The phrase Internet of Things (IoT) refers to the expansion of the internet into everyday devices. Some examples of IoT are thermostats, digital door locks, light bulbs and smart watches.
  13. The internet is everywhere, even on the top of Mount Everest, which over 29,000 feet above sea level. You can access 3G internet and cellular service at the summit.
  14. Online shopping has taken a toll on brick and mortar retail stores. Many once powerful retail stores have gone bankrupt because they didn’t adopt online shopping fast enough.
  15. In 2019, the Google Search engine had indexed between 54 and 67 billion webpages.
  16. According to the International Telecommunications Union, around 16% of the world’s population had the internet in 2005 and 53.6% of the world’s population had the internet in 2017.
  17. According to the International Telecommunications Union, Europe had the largest portion of their population with the internet at 79.6% and Africa had the lowest portion of their population with the internet at 21.8%.
  18. The first website is still online and running: info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
  19. In 2010, Finland became the first country to make access to the internet a legal right to its citizens.

Additional Resources About the Internet

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