I don't know if I'd say it's irrelevant if it's not used by the current industry. It's always helpful to understand what is possible and how to achieve it. And

I don't know if I'd say it's irrelevant if it's not used by the current industry. It's always helpful to understand what is possible and how to achieve it. And beyond actual application, formalizations of fairness notions and thinking about their implications for computing gives us another lens to think about fairness more broadly (as in, these kinds of technical discussions can give specificity and clarity to discussions of fairness even beyond machine learning and computing). To your second point, it's very difficult to attribute a single intention to large companies. There are certainly employees and researchers at large tech companies that work on fairness and privacy preservation because they think it's important and want to make their companies more responsible (I know some!). It's also certainly true that exploring this type of research looks good for the company, and some other employees are surely aware of that and promoting it for those reasons.