How green is the Internet?

How green is the Internet? Not green at all would have to be the answer to that question.

Information and communication technology is said to directly contribute a whopping 2% of global carbon emissions according to Bell Labs research and the average network user consumes an estimated 25 watts of energy.

This means that worldwide the use of landlines, mobile phones, blackberries, personal computers etc. result in more greenhouse gas emissions in a year than total annual emission levels from entire countries like Australia and, the industry's carbon levels are expected to more than double over the next decade if communication technology is allowed to continue as usual.

In an effort to reduce this dismal state of affairs a consortium (which includes the University of Melbourne's Institute for a Broadband-Enabled Society) has formed under the banner Green Touch to work towards an energy efficiency level, via changes in coding techniques which might eventually see the world's communications networks run for three years on the energy it currently takes to collectively power these networks for a day.

ITNews reports that the Australian Government already spent $1.411 million over three consecutive financial years on investigations used to create the nucleus of the URL blacklist it intends to use to censor the Internet from mid-2011, but what will the cost be in carbon terms once ISPs operating in this country have to run a mandatory filtering program against the online activity of every Australian user?