A new investigation has shown that tech giants, led by Microsoft and tech industry lobbying org DigitalEurope, have pressured the EU to make it harder for the public to know the environmental impact of their data centers.

Investigate Europe, along with other media partners, including Die Zeit, El País Le Monde, and The Guardian, discovered that the provision as it was written in EU rules matched lobbyist requests almost verbatim. Legal experts who were approached about the story said that clause could be a violation of EU transparency rules on the Aarhus Convention on public access to environmental data.

The Aarhus Convention (full text here), commits signatories, which include the European Union, to grant the public access to information, justice and participation when it comes to processes and decisions around the environment.

The investigate Europe investigation revealed text suggested to the European Commission by Microsoft and DigitalEurope says:

“Member States concerned shall keep confidential all information and key performance indicators…Such information shall be considered confidential information affecting the commercial interests of operators and owners of data centers.”

The text that finally ended up in the Commission rules says:

“The Commission and Member States concerned shall keep confidential all information and key performance indicators for individual data centres…Such information shall be considered confidential information affecting the commercial interests of operators and owners of data centres.”

It also seems clear that not only has the European Commission acquiesced to tech industry requests, but it is also policing on behalf of the industry. An email from a European Commssion leader last year reminded member states that they were “obliged to keep confidential all information and key performance indicators for individual data centres. It is really important to reiterate this point as the Commission has already received various requests for access to documents by the media or the public in relation to the data. All these requests have been so far refused. ”

The lack of clarity about data center and cloud carbon footprint and water usage has been an international scandal. AI technology is forcing the building of more and bigger data centers. Even data centers that claim to be “green” work at obscuring their total energy consumption and environmental impact. But new data centers have been outpacing low carbon power and are turning to fossil fuel technologies, like gas-powered turbines, for energy.

The media business consensus is that cloud-based production is usually lower carbon than on-premises options. But this assessment is almost always based on “common sense”, rather than real numbers. Industry think tank Greening of Streaming, in its work on measuring energy consumption in video distribution, has regularly found more energy consumed across the digital supply chain than is usually assumed.

To get access to good information that directly affects the industry – not to mention – the planet, media companies need to have access to unvarnished data about the real world impact of the tools they are using. They won’t be able to do this if their governments are working for someone else.

Read about Investigate Europe’s findings here.