It is estimated that information tech and services accounted for about 5% of total global electricity use and is increasing. For example, eliminating coal-fired air pollution alone in the United States would prevent about 52,000 premature American deaths per year. Concerns stem from the use of fossil fuel combustion to provide electricity generation and its concomitant negative externalities, which have well known negative environmental and health impacts.
With this rapid growth in Internet use, concern has arisen over the resultant electricity consumption.
A lot of this Internet time is at home, which has risen more than fivefold from 3.3 to 17.6 h per week. The Surveying the Digital Future study found that 92% of Americans are Internet users and that, on average, since 2000, the time they spent online more than doubled from 9.4 h to 23.6 h per week. Open source ad blockers are a potentially effective technology for energy conservation.Īmericans now spend unprecedented amounts of time online. Globally, uBlock Origin could save consumers more than $1.8 billion/year. In the United States, if all Internet users enabled Privacy Badger on their computers, Americans would save more than $91 million annually. The energy conserved if everyone in the United States used the open source ad blocker would save over 36 Americans lives per year if it were to offset coal-fired electricity generated-based pollution. Thus, uBlock Origin has the potential to save the average global Internet user more than 100 h annually. The results show that page load time dropped 11% with AdBlock+, 22.2% with Privacy Badger, and 28.5% with uBlock Origin. Page load time is recorded for browsing a representative selection of the globally most-accessed websites, and the time spent watching ads on videos is quantified for both trending and non-trending content. In this study, three open source ad blockers are tested against a no-ad blocker control. Open source ad blockers have the potential to reduce the time and thus electricity spent using computers by eliminating ads during Internet browsing and video streaming. Internet-related electricity consumption is rising rapidly as global Internet users spend more than 6.5 h per day online.
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