Make Radboud University independent of BigTech within three years. This is the call being made by a group of staff and students in an open letter to the Executive Board.

Come up with a concrete plan to become independent from BigTech companies like Microsoft365 within three years. This is the call being made by a group of concerned staff and students at Radboud University in an open letter to the Executive Board.

The letter, which has been circulated since Monday and has now been signed 459 times, argues that this dependence poses risks to privacy, security and academic freedom.

Vulnerable

The immediate reason for the open letter is the dire geopolitical situation since Donald Trump’s re-election, says initiator and Associate Professor of digital privacy, Jaap-Henk Hoepman. ‘Dependence on US cloud providers makes European organisations vulnerable to sanctions’, he explains.

But that was not the only reason for writing the open letter. ‘This is a cumulation of frustration and irritation at the fact that we have become so dependent on Big Tech, including within our university. Professor Bart Jacobs previously criticised the university’s move to Microsoft 365, but the university ignored him.’

Currently, much of the crucial digital infrastructure at Radboud University is in the hands of large technology companies, say the signatories of the letter. This not only includes Microsoft’s email, document writing, video calling and data storage services. It also applies to key university systems, such as the administration system running on Oracle and the Turnitin plagiarism software. All this technology makes the university vulnerable, according to the authors of the letter.

They point to the risk that access to BigTech services could be abruptly cut off, or that the threat thereof could be used to push geopolitical adversaries in a particular direction. ‘Not only is this a possibility, it has already happened’, says Hoepman, referring to the Amsterdam Trade Bank that was cut off from US cloud infrastructure and went bankrupt (see box).

Collaboration

While the authors of the letter acknowledge that the university cannot stop using Big Tech overnight, they ask the Executive Board to set a “dot on the horizon”. They call for investment in alternative, non-profit and open-source software solutions, such as the European Nextcloud for cloud services or Jitsi for online meetings.

In addition, the signatories appeal for collaboration at national and international levels. In the Netherlands, the university could join forces with SURF, the ICT organisation for education and research, to work on alternatives. Hoepman: “As a university, we are a public institution, responsible for public values. We need to take a stand with other institutions. The bigger the movement, the easier the transition.”

This risk is not limited to organisations with Russian connections. Indeed, the US recently imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court following arrest warrants against Israeli leaders. For now, Microsoft has not yet shut down its services to the Criminal Court, but the threat is not yet off the table.

Other universities in Germany and France are already taking such steps, says Hoepman, but the the science faculty at Radboud University is also showing the way, he says. ‘That faculty has its own mail server and other in-house services and that works fine. It is not very complex: like in the past, email and office applications can just run locally on the laptop instead of in the cloud. This model can be rolled out to the entire university.’

Concrete steps

Hoepman hopes the letter will receive a positive response from the Executive Board. ‘It would be nice if the Executive Board lets us know soon that they support this and that they will immediately take concrete steps’, he says. ‘The road to digital autonomy obviously takes time, but the board cannot afford to reject this outright.’

Doing nothing is not an option, says the Associate Professor. ‘There is a real risk that universities or governments will then at some point be faced with certain services being shut down or that we will no longer have access to data. You need to be prepared.’

‘This is not just a university problem, but a national and European problem’, says Hoepman. ‘The more institutions become independent of BigTech, the less that leverage becomes.’