Note: The submission deadline has been extended until November 7, 2022.
IAB workshop on Environmental Impact of Internet Applications and
Systems
Web page: https://www.iab.org/activities/workshops/e-impact/
Background
Internet communications and applications have both environmental costs
and benefits. In the positive direction, they can reduce the
environmental impact of our society, for instance, by allowing virtual
interaction to replace physical travel. Of course, the Internet can
equally well act as an enabler for increasing physical goods
consumption, for instance, through easing commerce.
Beyond the effects associated with its use, Internet applications do not
come for free either. The Internet runs on systems that require energy
and raw materials to manufacture and operate. While the environmental
benefits of the Internet may certainly outweigh this use of resources in
many cases, it is incumbent on the Internet industry to ensure that this
use of resources is minimized and optimized. In many cases, this is
already an economic necessity due to operational costs. And because many
consumers, businesses, and civil societies care deeply about the
environmental impact of the services and technologies they use, there is
also a clear demand for providing Internet services with minimal
environmental impact.
This is a broad topic, ranging from technical questions to economics,
business decisions, and policies. Technical, standards, and research
communities can help ensure that we have a sufficient understanding of
the environmental impact of the Internet and its applications. They can
also help to design the right tools to continue to build and improve all
aspects of the Internet, such as addressing new functional needs, easing
of operations, improving performance and/or efficiency, or reducing
environmental impacts in other ways.
Workshop
The IAB is organizing a workshop to discuss the Internet's environmental
impact, discuss the evolving needs from industry, and to identify areas
for improvements and future work. While the focus is on technical
aspects, the scope is broadly on the entire Internet ecosystem, from the
communications to the devices, applications, data centers, etc.
The main goal of the workshop is to call further attention to the topic
and to bring together a diverse stakeholder community to discuss these
issues. The workshop shall also:
• Discuss the direct environmental impacts of the Internet, including
but not limited to energy usage by Internet systems themselves,
energy usage of the relevant end-user devices, resources needed for
manufacturing the associated devices, or the environmental impacts
throughout the lifecycle of Internet systems. Discuss the breakdown
of those impacts across different system components and operations.
Predict potential future trends for these impacts based on changed
usage patterns and emerging technologies.
• Discuss the indirect environmental impacts of the Internet, i.e.,
its effects on society overall, through enabling communications,
virtual services, or global commerce.
• Share information about relevant measurement metrics and data, and
identify the need for additional metric or measurements.
• Discuss the need for improvements or associated new functionality.
• Share information about the societal, business, and regulatory
situation, to help identify areas of opportunity.
• Identify areas where further technical work would be most impactful.
• Discuss specific improvement proposals.
We expect that the workshop discussions connect analysis of the issues
(e.g., scale of energy consumption or carbon footprint) to industry
needs (e.g., deployment opportunities) and solutions.
Business and societal policy questions are in scope only insofar as they
inform the workshop participants about the context we are in, but what
those policies should be is not for the workshop to decide or even
extensively discuss. The scope excludes also how the technical community
works and meets, such as the question of in-person or hybrid meetings
(but note that this workshop is virtual).
Practical details
The workshop is organized as three half-day virtual meetings starting
with a kick-off on Monday, December 5, 2022. The remaining sessions will
be scheduled according to participant availability, likely also in the
same week. A workshop report will be prepared after the meeting, to be
discussed among the participants and then published as an RFC.
Note: While the workshop results are open, the participants may decide
at the beginning of the meeting that specific contributions and
discussions can only be shared anonymously, i.e., without attribution or
inclusion of other identifying information.
Workshop participation is by invitation. Invitations are extended based
on program committee reviews of position paper submissions. Position
papers are typicall
