The French audiovisual, digital and telecommunications regulators, Arcep and Arcom, launched a public consultation on Monday October 9 in order to establish, by the beginning of 2024, “good practices” to reduce the environmental footprint of digital services.
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More streamlined digital services are one of the missions set by Arcep and Arcom, the reference authorities for audiovisual and telecoms. They want to disseminate good practices to reduce the environmental footprint of streaming, but also of software, social networks and more generally of all internet applications. Because awareness has already taken place on the side of phones, tablets and computers. Some models are now made from recycled materials, their electricity consumption becomes more virtuous and they are more easily repairable. The problem is that they access internet services which are more and more energy intensive.
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Play on the quality of algorithms to reduce consumption
Streaming today represents more than 50% of internet traffic, with a constantly increasing share. This means more and more servers consuming more and more energy. It’s even worse with artificial intelligence. It needs new servers with much more powerful processors that consume 10 to 15 times more electricity. Hence the need for awareness, but this time at the other end of the internet pipe.
The consultations are starting now, their objective: to obtain a set of good practices which can then be shared by the industry. This will necessarily involve a change of state of mind. Today, when we need more computing power, we simply add machines. Tomorrow, we could instead play on the quality of the algorithms, writing more optimized programs that consume fewer resources.
A sort of “energy sobriety label” for those who adopt good practices
This is what the streaming giants have started to do. They recompressed their videos so they took up less storage space and network bandwidth. They could go further by stopping playing videos automatically or offering lower quality on mobiles.
These will be simple recommendations, there will be nothing mandatory at this time. In any case, those who implement these good practices will be able to claim it with a sort of label of digital sobriety. Let us hope, as with Nutriscore, that the idea will be taken up in other countries. Because it is hard to imagine an internet service adopting these practices only for France.