Page 114 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

8 THE NEXT INTERNET 101

including its well-funded research arm the Defense Advanced Research
Products Agency (DARPA), as well as to the NSA and the CIA, helps to
explain why there are no challengers to US hegemony over the Next
Internet coming from Europe, whose telecommunications companies once
led the world.
China provides the only serious competition. There, government has
invested heavily in Next Internet technologies going as far as to integrate
them into its five-year plans and build entire cloud cities. This has benefited
leading companies like Alibaba, Baidu, Huawei, and Tencent, among
others. Signalling that it intends to challenge America’s lead, Alibaba has
set up shop in Silicon Valley and, like other Chinese firms, is building on
the enormous domestic market to extend its reach internationally (Tse and
Hendrichs 2016). A look at the remaining policy issues reveals why the
concentration of corporate power is such a significant problem and why it is
essential that societies begin to consider the need for public intervention to
regulate and control the Next Internet as an information utility.
Because the digital world is made up of invisible electrons zipping
through the air, there is a tendency to view it as immaterial. Nothing could
be further from the truth and the sooner this is recognized, the more likely
the environmental problems associated with the Next Internet will be
addressed. Cloud data centres are very material structures and, as they
come to fill the world, there are numerous emerging environmental policy
issues. It is expected that by 2017 data centres will consume 12% of the
global electricity grid (Sullivan 2015). Moreover, customer demand for
24/7 services requires several layers of backup power, including lead acid
batteries and diesel generators that have been found to be carcinogenic.
Furthermore, many data centres require large, continuous supplies of water
for their cooling systems and this raises serious policy issues in places like
the US West, where years of drought have taken their toll. So far, data
centre operators have used their economic power and the allure of pro-
mised jobs to successfully pressure local governments to provide property
tax breaks, cut-rate power deals, and relief from pollution regulations.
Some companies have responded to opposition from environmental
groups, especially Greenpeace, by incorporating solar and other sustainable
energy sources into their data centre power supplies. But as data require-
ments grow, systematic regulation is required, including a broad review of
discount power deals, the use of massively polluting backup systems, and
the diversion of water resources to cool servers. Notwithstanding any
progress in this area, the primary source of power consumption in the Next