182 points by cyberlimerence33 days ago | 63 comments
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I have complete confidence the EU will realise this may violate transparency laws, it will go to court in 7-8 years, publish a response in the next 5 finally getting this law fixed in about 2040. They always get these things right, in the end
I wonder if this is less about the environmental impact (which can be greenwashed as necessary), and more about the power consumption of individual data centres.
That tracks. I've seen PUE data get used in competitive benchmarking within the industry — knowing a facility's power draw alongside its rack count lets you infer cooling efficiency and hardware density pretty precisely.
I find this facet of Capitalism the most concerning; fiduciary responsibility to the shareholder. It breaks the link between people and matters that concern society (like the environment, in the case of this article). In the drive to increase profit, individual legislators can be convinced to tweak a law or two for 'greater economic growth' somewhere. Over the decades, the effect is a shift in political power away from the people and into industry and ultimately into the hands of a few. I've come to think that this is what we're witnessing in the US. While we're not looking, the landscape is changing behind the scenes. Bram Vranken's quote from the article is poignant: 'Who does the Commission really represent: Big Tech or the public interest?' I often wonder what can be done by us (i.e. all people) to push back and it mostly requires a lot of effort from everyone; participation in Democracy.
This isn't solely due to shareholder fiduciary duty. Even without such a duty, the shareholders would fire anyone who doesn't put them first. Even without shares, a sole owner of a company would also do that. No matter your position, you don't get to do things that are bad for your boss, so the ultimate bosses (whoever they are in a given system) hold all the power.
And power has a tendency to accumulate. Powerful people always use their power to increase their power. There are no exceptions.
IIRC fiduciary duty to shareholders is actually a common misconception -- it's more of a cultural norm than a strict legal requirement in most jurisdictions. But your broader point about power accumulation holds regardless of the legal framing.
No fiduciary responsibility needed, democracy alone is enough to encourage corruption.
For example, a company decision-maker responsible for picking the city/county/country in which their company will put a new factory is in position of great influence on municipal/regional/national level politics - simply because the people want jobs, and politicians want to be popular with the people.
The issue is corruption and it is in capitalism, socialism and communism. Corruption is everywhere all the time. Capitalism is just redistribution of resources. There is also redistribution of resources in communism and there the corruption i would say is even bigger. Less in amount for one specific person, but spread out throught society that it rots from inside.
> I find this facet of Capitalism the most concerning; fiduciary responsibility to the shareholder.
That’s not the least of my concerns. My problem with capitalism is its desire to influence politics in its favor, and the utter lack of regulation amongst politicians (ie self regulation) to forbid this practice.
The whole industry of lobbying should not be allowed to exist.
The fiduciary duty framing misses something practical — we bent our own policies plenty at small companies when big contracts were on the line, no shareholders required. People just want to keep the lights on.
Can anyone name any other industry that is as open and transparent about power and water usage as the IT industry? How much energy does your local oil refinery, metal smelter, borax plant use?
Large data center operators are already far more transparent with their annual reports than any other industry.
We hit Le Monde paywalls all the time researching EU policy stuff. Reader mode in Firefox or Safari sometimes gets past it. If not, the Google cache usually works for a few days after the piece goes up.
Data centers are uber resource hogs: land, water, power. They compete for the same resources as other industries but also against the local citizenry. Who benefits from mass consumption of the resources and at what cost. Age old debate.
The secrecy carveout fits a pattern — voluntary disclosure frameworks almost always underperform mandatory ones. As far as I know, there's decent empirical work on this in environmental economics going back decades. Negotiated exemptions tend to ossify.
