Bobbie Johnson over at Guardian Tech has been posting some interesting reports on the internet’s hunger for power (currently growing at roughly 10% annually), which have prompted Google to re-emphasise their commendable Carbon-neutral status on their blog, but also served to remind us that Google is an exception rather than the rule when it comes to internet companies and carbon footprints.
All this got me thinking about the potential for government regulation for the sector as a whole; seemingly unlikely on the face of it (it is not high in the public perception of environmental threats), but nonetheless perhaps essential considering the upward patterns of our web use and consequent power consumption.
Unfortunately however there is one massive problem with this concept, and…