To wonder who pays for the internet

[BreathesOutSlowly]

Who is paying for the massive data centres that support the internet? The ton of energy that it costs to have bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies? It must be us but how? In our mobile phone tariffs, via general taxes?

It's worldwide but who pays for it in other countries. Do any refuse?

Does anyone know the answer? It's been bugging me for ages

Thanks 😊

Also, yes, mining bitcoin does take up huge amounts of energy. It probably now costs more in energy to mine bitcoin than it is worth, now that the price has dropped 50%. But those energy costs are paid by private individuals as part of the running costs of their data centres.

To try to cut down the energy costs of data centres all kinds of things have been tried. There are datacentres in the arctic and Microsoft even investigated putting them underwater. That's because servers are heat sensitive but generate massive amounts of heat, so most of the energy costs actually comes from cooling servers rather than the cost of them running and producing heat.

Companies either own data centres, which are paid for by their revenue, or they pay the owners of the data centres. As PP said, it's the same as warehouses. It's a cost that gets covered by the money generated, and so forms a part of the cost to the end user.

We would still have a climate crisis if you shut down the internet

Overall the connected equipment you have in your home - the tv, computers , ring doorbells - have a bigger environmental impact than the rest of the internet where resources are shared between everyone

So turn things off , don't use video to listen to music , make all your electronics last as long as possible

i have a couple of websites for work and I pay monthly fees to host them.

Instagram, fb accounts are free but they make money via ad revenue.

I guess why some small businesses use insta or fb instead of having an actual website.

It's not just the energy that internet related things use that counts though. There's the energy and resources used to make the phones, smart TVs etc and the frequency with which they are replaced. Then there's the cost of disposing of them.

That makes sense. So why aren't governments putting pressure on companies to make tech more repairable and updatable or even to discourage excessive use of tech in the home?

The companies providing services to you pay for the data centres and bandwidth they use.

They pay for this through advertising revenue, and by selling the data they get from you to advertising brokers.

When you are using a ‘free’ service, you are the product. What this means is that when you use a free social media site, the host company will earn money from other organisations who want to advertise to a particular demographic. It might be a company who wants to advertise to women, who may want to reach people browsing mumsnet style and beauty for example.

2 main reasons -

Increased consumption of products keeps the economy growing. The economy depends on people replacing things frequently.

The other core reason is that tech is improving so quickly that old stuff becomes obsolete pretty fast. If nobody bought the new, improved tech and kept their 20 year old tech then there would be virtually no investment into even newer technology.

That's a good question. But it's a bit like asking " why don't why just ban bad things". Lots of people make money from making more and more things. And governments are made of people. People think the internet is cool.

II think it’s a good question and one that I think will be hard to answer. I suspect some is subsided by countries selling electricity too cheaply or subsidied and becoming overwhelmed with data centres. By lots of unicorn companies that’s haven’t made a profit burning investment funding or running up debit.

Chat GPT uses way more data than Google search but everyone is drawing AI pictures for free. How?

I know a lot of media websites are struggling with ad revenue so I think that aspect of the internet will disappear and be replaced with subscription only websites.

Banks will pay for their data to be hosted there, and part of your interest payments and account fees goes towards it as well as to bank branches and staffing etc.

If you have services like Dropbox, you pay an annual amount for them to hold that data in the cloud.

Lots of companies pay large amounts for their data to be held there.

And data centres are much more energy efficient than individual servers in lots of businesses all over the place. So while they do use a lot of energy, they use less than could be needed if they didn't exist. And they are large enough that the excess heat can be used for district heating schemes (like Tallaght in Ireland) or heating local swimming pools (like Paris in France) etc.

The internet started out connecting universities and was funded partly by the us military. Now there are millions of servers paid for by different companies. And both companies and consumers pay in a variety of ways. Advertising and subscriptions mostly

Increased consumption of products keeps the economy growing. The economy depends on people replacing things frequently

But what if we consumed less but more expensive (and more robust) tech stuff? If the internet made it possible for us to live more sustainably by renting and repairing more? In fact maybe we could have a world where everyone worked less, earned less money, spent less money and did more for society for free?

I realise I have digressed massively from my original question...

Well that's how things used to be and I agree it was better. The economy has totally changed, obsoletion is programmed into household goods to ensure that people keep purchasing things.

Tech is different though. By that logic, smart phones wouldn't have been invented. We all might still be listening to CD's on indestructible Sony Discmans and watching 5 channels on our robust analogue TVs.

The economy is a human invention based around outdated concepts

We don't make money from anything really - except what we have decided has value

We don't actually need continuous growth either - that's just how things have been structured by our political systems

We could have a functioning society where value was given to hours worked and effort rather than the things we make

Requires a huge shift in mindset especially from those with wealth and privilege

So:

A) Tech progress = inevitable move to less sustainable, less compassionate more consumerist society.

B) Date centres are paid for us all and facilitate this move away from sustainability in the name of progress.

C) Bitcoin is power hungry and a waste of space.

Good question. Ultimately you are paying with your personal data. The big data users are Facebook/Instagram and Google/Youtube. I think the top 2-3 companies account for half of data traffic. They build data centres and give servers for free to internet providers like BT and Sky so that users have a good service/low latency (called a Cached Data Network or CDN)

In turn, they are funded by collecting very detailed data on their users and then selling it to advertisers so that they can target ads.

So the lunch is not free, you are the lunch.

Oh. And I am the lunch.

Yep. You (we) are the lunch.

And 99% don't know it.

And now we have laptops and phones for which replacement batteries can't be installed.

In fact, you're even lunch when you're buying lunch.

Netflix, Amazon, Google, Online supermarkets, the NHS etc are all amassing vast amounts of sensitive data about you and trying to find legal ways to match it all together (Big Data!) so they know literally every single thing about you, including the way you think.

With the way big data analysis is going, 'they' will understand you better than you understand yourself. Dangerous territory really - especially seeing how easy it was for the behavioural scientists to manipulate people on a mass scale. Imagine if they knew what made individuals tick?

PS - why do you think Amazon Echo was so cheap?

So ultimately all this progress will be turning us from buses into trams and we don't even realise it is happening.

Terrifying. It is enough to take one right off grid. Do they do a non digital version of Mumsnet talk do you think?

Any company that uses it, who then sells their service to another company, who then sells their service to another company, who then sells their service to an end user.