[cooperation-wg] A Plea for Climate Justice: Report from the IAB Workshop on e-Impact

Here are my thoughts:

Less energy usage means that we need to be more efficient with our energy.
It also means that scarcity will be a thing, and that drives prices up.
Sending or receiving data over the line will get more expensive, since
datacenters will need to invest heavily in new infrastructure.

Expect outages of the network, when there is no electricity available. Can
we handle that? Currently half the world is behind Cloudflare, and we know
what happens when that site goes down.

Internet is becoming a "key" factor. I am actually thinking of promoting
dial-up and packet radio as alternative sources, in case networks go down
and we need to rely on generators and powerbanks to access the internet.
Why not even implement RFC2549 (although it's really slow). I already
noticed that during one blackout, not only did I had no internet, I had no
heating, I had no hardline, no television, nothing. What would happen if
your datacenter was suddenly unreachable due to a power outage?

AI is an emerging tech, but consumes kWh of energy. Its going to go bigger
and bigger, with more and more people sitting more and more behind
computers, creating more and more data traffic.

My suggestion is actually to work from infrastructure up: How can I send
the most useful data using the least amount of bits, as efficiently as
possible? That is one way to reduce "bloat". Many frameworks actually
introduced bloat in their systems...

Secondly: How can I promote "green" networks? We have QoS and OSPF, but can
they be upgraded so they take electronic footprint into account? The
government wants to add "CO2 tax", but is it possible to implement this on
infrastructure? Like toll roads trading speed for payments, can we "tax"
traffic for using co2-heavy routes?

Having a website that can really efficiently send data back can for example
use a slower network, at lower CO2 cost and lower premium. But that should
not be up to the provider, but to the user sending that data. It might mean
the request is slower, but it also means that infrastructure that lower
their CO2 footprint will see increased traffic.

What you do want to prevent is to have ISPs do "traffic shaping", to force
requests to go through inefficient systems to reduce cost. This will be the
other end of the weighing scale: At one end you want to reduce the CO2
footprint, but at the other end you have companies having to make decisions
to meet that goal.

Just my 2 cents

Julius


Op di 20 dec. 2022 17:46 schreef Vesna Manojlovic <BECHA at ripe.net>:

> Dear colleagues,
>
> I wrote a report from the IAB's "Workshop on e-Impact":
>
> https://www.iab.org/activities/workshops/e-impact/
>
>  > Here is an urgent plea from network operators, academic researchers
>  > and activists: we must decrease energy consumption and materials
> usage > in Internet operations, governance, and standardisation. This is
> our
>  > only hope if we're to adapt to the current climate crisis and prevent
>  > catastrophic consequences.
>
> Please read the full article here:
>
>
> https://labs.ripe.net/author/becha/a-plea-for-climate-justice-report-from-the-iab-workshop-on-e-impact/
>
> Looking forward to your comments, contributions & questions!
>
> Regards,
> Vesna Manojlovic
>
> --
> Senior Community Builder, RIPE NCC
> https://labs.ripe.net/author/becha/
>
> --
>
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