Metropolitan Internet meets Post Growth
The objective of this project is to study opportunities for post-growth metropolitan internet access as a means to reduce the environmental impact of digital technologies. Inspired by Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics, post-growth industries strive to operate between the socio-economic floor corresponding to the satisfaction of the basic needs of all actors (individuals’ fundamental rights and social cohesion but also economic viability) and the ecological ceiling provided by planetary boundaries that restrict, e.g., greenhouse-gas emissions and the availability of raw materials. A post-growth economy must thus occupy that sweet spot of being profitable within the planetary boundaries and enabling a good life for all, which requires us to reconsider social, economic, political, and technical aspects of internet access, here at the metropolitan level.
To reduce the growing energy demands, emission and material footprint of internet infrastructure, this project will focus on the evolution of data traffic and the associated rebound effects. Our research hypothesis is that, to sustainably limit the environmental footprint of internet infrastructure (and the internet economy at large), data traffic must be considered as a limited resource that needs to be allocated equitably. In this context we develop a notion of frugality for the internet as a socio-technical innovation, where the rollout of new infrastructure to increase the traffic capacity is substantially reduced and infrastructure operators would operate existing equipment as long as possible. This raises many challenges that we aim to address in this project:
We aim to answer these questions in two research tracks. Firstly, we will explore the societal aspect and governance questions regarding a frugal internet on a qualitative and quantitative level, through surveys and participatory studies that explore the needs and expectations of individuals, telecom operators, businesses and policy makers in the Brussels metropolitan area. Participatory methods will further be used to prototype use-facing aspects of sustainable/post-growth telecom infrastructure, e.g., personal or community-wide configuration options, and to gather feedback regarding notions and the technical feasibility of these. Secondly, we will study technical aspects of implementing privacy-preserving arbitration and long-term security in 5G services as an approach for effective data traffic limitation and sustainability. This line of work envisions network infrastructure that satisfies strong data protection and privacy requirements based on Trusted Computing primitives to ascertain software integrity and to enable private computations. A quantitative sustainability assessment of the environmental impacts of technical proposals will be part of the research.
As results of this project, we envision to provide Belgian internet service providers (ISPs) with a comprehensive assessment of post-growth concepts for future connectivity regarding their potential societal acceptance, technical challenges and directions to resolve these in existing 5G infrastructures, and the expected impacts regarding energy consumption, greenhouse-gas emissions, and equipment requirements. We believe that our research will have important uses beyond environmental aspects of the internet economy but may, for example, also provide insights towards the operation and socio-economic context of equitable digital infrastructures as a response to the delayed rollout of 5G infrastructure in Brussels, the global chip shortage, and growing geopolitical tensions with the European Union’s sources of raw materials and high-tech equipment. Beyond these immediate and applicable insights, sustainability-focused internet access can be an enabler for a sustainable economy at large, with extensive indirect effects on businesses and the social and economic choices of citizens. Assessing these effects is, however, beyond the scope of this project.
For questions and suggestions about our research, please contact Prof. Dr. Jan Tobias Mühlberg by email: jan.tobias.muehlberg@ulb.be.
¹: Title image by Paolo Margari on Unsplash.