Study Islands of Resilience
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IMMI Research Report Islands of Resilience Comparative Model for Energy, Connectivity and Jurisdiction Realizing European ICT possibilities through a case study of Iceland Prepared at the request of: Smári McCarthy on behalf of Members of the European Parliament Christian Engström, Indrek Tarand, Carl Schlyter, Sandrine Bélier, Karima Delli, Eva Lichtenberger, Eleanor Saitta Raül Romeva i Rueda, Heide Rühle, Judith Sargentini, Bas Eickhout and Marije Cornelissen Islands of Resilience: Comparative Model for Energy, Connectivity and Jurisdiction Realizing European ICT possibilities through a case study of Iceland Smári McCarthy · Eleanor Saitta International Modern Media Institute 2012 Prepared at the request of: on behalf of Members of the European Parliament Christian Engström, Indrek Tarand, Carl Schlyter, Sandrine Bélier, Karima Delli, Eva Lichtenberger, Raül Romeva i Rueda, Heide Rühle, Judith Sargentini, Bas Eickhout and Marije Cornelissen 1 Produced at the request of Members of the European Parliament: Christian Engström Paül Romeva i Rueda Indrek Tarand Heide Rühle Carl Schlyter Judith Sargentini Sandrine Bélier Bas Eickhout Karmima Delli Marije Cornelissen Eva Lichtenberger Authors: Layout: Smári McCarthy Jonas Smedegaard Eleanor Saitta Smári McCarthy Contributing Researchers: Online Support: Guðjón Idir Jonatan Walck Jason Scott Jonas Smedegaard Photo credits: Smári McCarthy (cover, road, waterfall, island; CC-BY) James Cridland (Alþingi; CC-BY) Stuck in Customs (geyser; CC-BY-NC-SA) IMMI – International Modern Media Institute Copyright © September 2012 This work is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported License. The viewpoints in this report belong to the authors, and they may not necessarily concur partially or wholly with IMMI's viewpoints as an institute. 2 Table of Contents Abstract......................................................................................................................................................4 Introduction................................................................................................................................................5 Model and Methodology...................................................................................................................6 Modelling Iceland...............................................................................................................................7 Energy.........................................................................................................................................................9 Energy Model ...................................................................................................................................10 Analysis of Iceland...........................................................................................................................11 Connectivity..............................................................................................................................................19 Connectivity Model..........................................................................................................................20 Analysis of Iceland...........................................................................................................................21 Jurisdiction...............................................................................................................................................29 Jurisdiction Model............................................................................................................................30 Analysis of Iceland...........................................................................................................................31 Icelandic Modern Media Initiative................................................................................................41 Freedom of Information Act..........................................................................................................43 Network Neutrality..........................................................................................................................44 Communications Protection and Communications Data Retention......................................45 Intermediary Liability Limitations...............................................................................................46 Libel Tourism Protection................................................................................................................47 Libel Reform and Publishing Liability Limitations....................................................................48 Whistleblower Protection..............................................................................................................49 Prior Restraint Limitations............................................................................................................50 Virtual Limited Liability Companies............................................................................................51 Selected Bibliography...............................................................................................................................53 Appendix A: Model Details.......................................................................................................................54 Energy................................................................................................................................................54 Connectivity......................................................................................................................................57 Jurisdiction........................................................................................................................................62 3 Abstract Locale is rapidly becoming one of the most important competitive differentiators in the provision of cloud-based information technology services. Broadly speaking, three categories of issues define a locale's fitness for hosting the cloud: energy, connectivity, and jurisdiction. Energy is the largest cost center for most cloud hosts. Beyond price per kilowatt hour, hosting companies must consider redundant network availability, power grid resilience, environmental sustainability, climate, and equipment cooling requirements as core parts of their energy strategy. Connectivity is clearly essential for hosts, and differentiating factors here include total installed bandwidth, current utilized bandwidth, hub redundancy, international uplink redundancy, round trip latency, traffic shaping and network neutrality. Jurisdictional issues are an area of emerging concern and awareness for cloud hosts, where the landscape is shifting rapidly. Hosting companies are deeply affected by intermediary liability, hosting liability, state and corporate surveillance, state and corporate censorship, the accessibility of and cost of interacting with courts, corruption, and socioeconomic stability. This report considers Iceland's relative competitive advantages and drawbacks as a hosting locale relating to these issues. 4 Introduction In January 2012, the authors of this paper understanding how systems crash is the wrote a preliminary study intended to give first step towards preventing them from a birds-eye view of the primary factors doing so. As a result, throughout this study, pertaining to energy, connectivity and we emphasize on redundancy, reliability, jurisdiction in Iceland, as applicable to elasticity, expansionary capacity and ICT1 growth in general and cloud hosting in reaction to systemic burden. particular. We were interested in exploring Our hope is that with this model, it will be the possibilities available for Iceland in possible to identify islands of resilience in a terms of ICT development, and found that sea of insecurity. there were clear advantages that Iceland had in relation to ICTs, although there were also some substantial weaknesses. From the beginning, it was clear that a more thorough study would be required, in particular focused on the development of a generalized comparative model for energy, connectivity and jurisdiction, with the goal of making it possible to compare any two countries or regions. With this model, which is based on almost 80 variables, we intend to lay the groundwork for further investigations into the European ICTs sector, while also giving insights into the Icelandic situation as previously analyzed, when seen through the lens of this model. In particular, we focus on the question of resilience. While it is traditional to consider the sustainability and the economic viability of projects, in particular in the ICTs sector, it is rarer to see a holistic investigation from the standpoint of what can possibly fail. Analyzing the failure modes in a system is often more important than analyzing the operation modes: 5 Model and Methodology Central to this paper is an analytical model companies taking into account as they place which provides a method for comparing new data centers, particularly as the cloud different countries, or regions within hosting market becomes increasingly countries, on the basis of access to energy, competitive and commoditized. As no connectivity and jurisdiction. Among the historical data exists for the cloud hosting factors taken into account are energy market against which a rubric could be source scalability, renewability and price, tested, we use a simple accumulative, flatly- generation redundancy grid reliability,