[UberMouse]

From skimming the paper[1] they pulled that number from it seems... not the best metric. It looks like they are estimating the power consumption of the internet, then dividing that power usage by the amount of data transferred and claiming that is the cost per gigabyte.

But that's including a _lot_ energy cost that isn't related to _transferring_ the data, but storing/generating/running services to send that data etc

[1] https://www.emergeinteractive.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02...

[culi]

> But that's including a _lot_ energy cost that isn't related to _transferring_ the data, but storing/generating/running services to send that data etc

Well, doesn't that make it an even more accurate measurement of how much our data really impacts the environment? Data doesn't just exist at the moment its being transferred...

[butlerm]

Transit providers accept traffic for delivery anywhere in the world at a tiny fraction of that figure, suggesting that the fully allocated cost per GB is not quite as high as they represent. I trust transit service is not in a venture capital funded bubble subject to collapse any day now.

The same analysis goes for storage and processing. The economic marginal cost of storing and generating data as such is quite low, probably lower than the transit cost, especially since most data stored is either soon discarded or transmitted a large number of times.

Both are among the most successful economies of scale ever invented, pretty much the opposite of what the article alleges. Measure this out as a percentage of GDP or transit/storage cost per hour of work or entertainment - it is certainly worth more than one airline industry in economic terms, advances we could hardly live without unless the plan is to roll back living standards to the 1970s or earlier.