Open letter to the Executive University Board: Calling for a transformation to digital autonomy

We, the undersigned, express our concern about Utrecht University’s increasing reliance on services from Big Tech companies (particularly Microsoft, Google, Amazon) for our research, teaching and administrative activities. Several years ago, the Rectors of the Dutch universities collectively and wisely warned about this. Since then, little has happened; worse, almost all Dutch universities migrated to Big Tech cloud services, at the expense of our internally operated computer centers.

Utrecht University is currently largely dependent on Microsoft Office 365 for all our office work: emailing, writing documents, creating presentations, making video calls, sharing documents and storing our data. Other significant dependencies exist for several key systems at our university. This creates multiple vulnerabilities, especially in the light of a rapidly changing geopolitical situation.

First of all, there are significant security and privacy risks. Access to adopted services rely on authentication services  that depend on transatlantic connections, that may be cut at the whims of the American government. In such a situation, all research and teaching would come to an immediate halt. We are also losing control over our data. Microsoft and other companies whose services we rely on can be required by law to share our communications, documents, and sensitive (personal) data with US agencies. The fact that the data is stored on European servers offers no (legal) protection (because of the U.S. CLOUD Act) and any protections that would be offered can be circumvented by US authorities without transparency.

Apart from these immediate security and privacy concerns, our reliance on Big Tech is fundamentally at odds with public values like freedom, independence, autonomy and equality— as pointed out already in 2019 by the Rectors. The digital services we use for our research and teaching are profoundly shaping our professional practices; the incorporation of the newest AI-tools (e.g. co-Pilot) in basic software (e.g. MS Office 365), substantially shape our teaching and research and hence impact our professional autonomy.

Replacement of academic ICT infrastructure with software services from large companies has also changed what universities can offer to their community as well as to society in general. This is because universities increasingly favor corporate ICT and management environments over in-house or open source solutions developed for universities. In the process, they loose key capacity and flexibility to manage services beyond what is offered by the dominant companies. This inadvertently creates a preferential environment for the bigger players.

The matters combined transform universities from being a source of technical innovation and knowledge distribution to consumers of services. Or worse, by moving more research practices and associated innovation into the clouds, these companies end up determining the conditions for research, nudging research agendas and outcomes towards implementations in their environments. This means publicly funded research can at times come to entrench the dominance of these few companies into the future.

With this open letter we call upon you to change course, thereby freeing our university from this heavy reliance on services from these companies and contributing to greater technological self-determination, resilience and public innovation for and with universities across Europe.

We understand that these developments happened slowly over the years and our university cannot switch to its own IT-infrastructure or rebuild its ICT departments immediately. We therefore ask you to define a point on the horizon and collaboratively define a strategy. We ask you to make our university’s explicit policy goal to move universities away from being consumers of Big Tech services in three years time. Universities, in collaboration with each other and SURF, need to work towards technical infrastructures and practices that restore our role in charting democratic and equitable digital futures.  

Alternatives to Big Tech offerings — based on non-profit motives, public values and transparency — do exist and are essential for universities to transform digitally. Importantly, the less we use these alternatives, the more our reliance on Big Tech becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Below we list several things which can be done immediately.
 

• Locally: reverse the ongoing transition to Big Tech and invest in local expertise and deployment, for instance by running our own mail server, initiating Nextcloud initiatives, etc.
• Nationally: use your influence within SURF to make the point on the horizon a national goal for the (higher) education sector. Help turn universities into an engine of innovation for transformative and equitable digital futures.
• Internationally: work with other European universities (notably in Germany and France) for an autonomous academic IT-infrastructure that could be a source of innovation and resilience globally.

We have already started a dialogue with our UU-University Board to start moving towards digital resilience and self-determination in academic institutions across Europe and beyond. If you support this strategy, please sign this local petition to show your concerns and bring them to the attention of our university, preferably before April 16, 2025. We hope our initiative will be picked up by colleagues at other universities in The Netherlands to show the broad academic base of our concerns.

Sincerely,

Prof. dr. Albert Meijer (Professor of Public Innovation, Utrecht University)

Prof. dr. José van Dijck (Professor of Media and Digital Society, Utrecht University)

This is an adaptation of a petition that was initiated by Jaap-Henk Hoekman, Bart Jacobs and Tamar Sharon from Radboud University Nijmegen.