GCC children need protection built into the internet, not left to parents

Globally, 1 in 3 internet users is a child, according to UNICEF. In the UAE, internet penetration has reached 99%, according to DataReportal's Digital 2024 report, among the highest anywhere in the world. The digital world is not something GCC children encounter occasionally. It is the environment they are growing up in.

That should prompt a serious question: who is responsible for keeping them safe in it?

For too long, the answer has defaulted to parents. Install an app. Set a filter. Have a conversation. And while parental involvement matters, asking individual families to defend against a threat operating at industrial scale is the wrong framework entirely. The data makes that clear.

In 2025, AI-generated child sexual abuse videos increased by 26,385% in a single year — from 13 detected videos to 3,440. According to the IWF Annual Report 2025, the number of commercial child sexual abuse sites doubled. Over 300,000 reports containing child sexual abuse material were processed by the Internet Watch Foundation's analysts. These are not edge cases. They are the outputs of a criminal infrastructure scaling faster than any app, any filter, or any household conversation can address.

The organisations making the most impact on child online safety are not building better apps. They are working at the infrastructure level, where protection is universal and automatic. That is the model the GCC should be accelerating.

The region has made genuine progress on policy. Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 has placed digital citizenship at the centre of its national agenda. The UAE has built one of the most progressive regulatory environments for technology globally. But policy intent and infrastructure delivery are two different things — and the gap between them is where children remain exposed.

Network-level protection changes that equation. When safety is embedded into the connection itself, it does not depend on a parent's technical literacy, a child's compliance, or a device being configured correctly. It applies to every child, on every connection, from the moment they go online. The technology and intelligence to deliver this exists today. What is needed is a decision by the region's telecom operators, regulators, and governments to treat it as a baseline expectation — not an optional extra.

The technology to protect children at the network level exists today. confirmed abuse material can be automatically checked against verified databases and blocked, and known illegal websites can be stopped before they ever load. The intelligence to power it exists today.

For telecom operators, this represents one of the most meaningful opportunities in a generation, to move beyond connectivity as a commodity and position themselves as genuine guardians of the digital experiences their subscribers have. The operators who move first on this will not just be doing the right thing. They will be defining what responsible connectivity looks like in the region, and setting a standard that others will follow.

In a part of the world that has already shown it can lead on 5G, digital regulation, and financial technology, child online safety is the next frontier. The infrastructure is ready. The question is who will lead.