It's interesting, if we look at the size of webpages in everyday browsing, which can go from tens of megabytes to a few kilobytes when blocking tracking/analytics scripts.

I wonder what would be the back of the napkin calculations for network traffic and energy savings (local and server side) of regulating tracking and telemetry?

Is there an environmental case to be made against modern web practices on tracking and telemetry?

I've really come to dislike Google over the past decade or so, but I do like that their Speedtests, Lighthouse etc don't hide this fact from you.

Pretty much all sites I've been asked to look at were getting low scores because of Google Tag Manager, Adsense and the like. It has a very measurable impact, and yeah, removing it speeds up the page.

The environmental case will probably not fly for regulation, but it just might in public shaming of large companies. "Hey, $company, your usage of $trackingTech uses as much power per year as an average family of four. Is that really in line with your green approach?"

Thank you!

This is exactly one of the reasoning pillars i'm using in arguments about the "innocuous" nature of telemetry and tracking.

Any new product that collects telemetry/does tracking requires storage that is bought and connected to a power source with high availability given it performs I/O all the time.

I agree to that. I also do not care too much about the telemetry, but silence (on the network not the telemetry) should be the default.