So, I was browsing a science/technology/whatever blog, and a student reference librarian asks the question as posed by her professor: “What does the Internet cost? All of it, globally, from the very beginning. The electricity it takes to run every server, every laptop. The salaries. The grants. The cost of every bit of fiber optic cable in the ground around the world, every little detail.” From the point of view of the most ignorant inquirer.
It elicited a lot of answers, so just to be perverse, and as a bit of fun, I thought I’d pose the same question to the STW Hive Mind.

I’d say about the same as Motorways

$5.

very interesting question. It would also be interesting to estimate how much it earns.

I worked for a ISP and there was a £3 difference in the price of there phone line plan and the phone line and broadband plan. Also the company made no profit on the service until the 16 month of service being active. So give or take it’s about £2 to the £3 a month unless your service is piggybacked of another ISP.

£6.99 a month…..

Everytime you click your mouse a baby seal dies

Impossible to measure, really.

I bet you Osama Bin Laden never knew that clicking would kill a seal, else he would have been clicking like mad 😉

No money at all but it inconveniences a hell of a lot of electrons.

It is impossible to disentangle from the wider economy by now I’d have thought. And therefore any estimate of how much it actually costs in terms of paying for servers, lines etc is meaningless because presumably only a net cost (geddit? 🙂 ) is important. So you’d have to subtract all the money it makes and saves.

Everytime you click your seal a baby mouse dies