The internet is one of the most important things created by humanity.
It's like human civilization giving itself a nervous system, allowing
any person anywhere to communicate instantly with any other part of the
system, and to have access to almost the sum of human knowledge. We take
things like Google and Wikipedia for granted because we live with them
every day, but they would seem almost magical to most people from the
not-so-distant past. And while 2.5 billion people have access to the net
today, that number keeps growing fast and someday soon almost everybody
will be online.
As marvellous an invention as the internet is, it
can be made better by reducing the amount of pollution generated from
running it. Since a lot of internet traffic ends up in the massive
data-centers of a few big companies, looking at what they're doing to
clean up their act is a good proxy for how green (or not) the internet
is. Greenpeace has recently released a very interest report that does just that.
It's
interesting to note who the bigger winners and losers are. Apple, a
company that was heavily criticized by Greenpeace a few years ago, seem
to have cleaned up its act the most, with the best marks of any of the
big online players.
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