I'd bet a lot that non-video-streaming web browsing is a tiny bit of "tech carbon consumption". What's consuming most is probably big DCs doing various backend compute stuff and high-speed/high-bandwidth streaming (on the web and mostly out of the web, like netflix and co). Also for high-tech a very big part (in the 10s of %) of whole-life energy consumption is used at manufacture (and destruction), not during use, so a big driver of consumption is culturaly and technologicaly-induced turnover/obsolescence.
As for the web, imho there's mostly one hard solution being static web-sites being aggressively cached in a broadcast tree (as in real offline-modes, website downloading). Just like high-speed personal transportation vs collective fixed-schedule medium-speed transportation. I'd guess internet consumption is not much dependent on distance, but speed and duplication of the transfers, that's probably a thing.
In this kind of realm i'd be curious to see the life-cycle energy cost comparison of radio-broadcast numeric TV vs cabled broadcast. Perhaps we could use numeric radio-broadcast as a distribution channel for many-to-one websites like news and newsletter-type of big social media profiles. I hope to one day say "oh it's 4:03 i'll tune my receiver to get the local blog updates".
As for the web, imho there's mostly one hard solution being static web-sites being aggressively cached in a broadcast tree (as in real offline-modes, website downloading). Just like high-speed personal transportation vs collective fixed-schedule medium-speed transportation. I'd guess internet consumption is not much dependent on distance, but speed and duplication of the transfers, that's probably a thing.
In this kind of realm i'd be curious to see the life-cycle energy cost comparison of radio-broadcast numeric TV vs cabled broadcast. Perhaps we could use numeric radio-broadcast as a distribution channel for many-to-one websites like news and newsletter-type of big social media profiles. I hope to one day say "oh it's 4:03 i'll tune my receiver to get the local blog updates".