Green Internet Site

(CC0) Green Internet

Larry Neal Gowdy

Green-Internet was a not-for-profit organization that promoted visitor privacy, visitor security, and the lessening of bandwidth to help conserve energy, servers, life-hours spent downloading web pages, and the environment. The green-Internet site had no graphics, no ads, and no tracking scripts.

The extension named Disconnect for the Firefox®, Opera®, Safari®, and Chrome® browsers is a good tool that shows and/or blocks the ads and tracking scripts on web pages. The typical small websites of today have around ten ads and tracking scripts per page, while the typical commercial web page has around fifty to eighty ads and tracking scripts (I have seen web pages with over 3000).

Of the average websites that I have personally evaluated, roughly 17% of the bandwidth was consumed by ads/tracking scripts, plus another 50-60% was wasted on scammy images and JavaScript (usually the images associated with the ads themselves). Mass media news sites are commonly 2% low quality content plus 98% ads and tracking scripts (e.g. a 37 kilobyte HTML page with over 2.25 megabytes of ads). As a ballpark idea, roughly half of all energy and life wasted on the Internet now is caused by scam ads, tracking scripts, junk images, and the tracking servers themselves.

Since the general public has no interest in the environment nor their own online safety, then perhaps the best and only feasible greening of the Internet is to use plugins like Disconnect. But either way, the usefulness of the Internet ended years ago when the scammers and sickos took over, which left no reason for green-Internet to stay online.