Robert W. GehlOct 27, 2023

Does this book exist?

"How Universities Lost the Internet"

or has someone done research on this topic? That is, the fact that many North American universities have ceded all technical capacity to Microsoft, Google, etc?

It used to be students could get web hosting, email, and even some cool experimental online stuff through their schools. Now every online communication channel is locked down.

Show threadChris Siebenmann
@rwg As a university sysadmin who was (and is) there at the time, one reason can be put as the multi-level 'universities couldn't complete with GMail'. This is literally true, there is no free web mail environment as good as GMail, and also at the development level. GMail development probably costs Google millions or tens of millions of dollars a year (& has for a decade+), and universities can neither spend that sort of money nor attract those developers. GMail is simply better.
Oct 29, 2023 at 5:37pmWeb
Show threadChris SiebenmannOct 29, 2023

@rwg My university built, ran, and then gave up a hosted institutional email environment because, as I understood it, the operating costs in hardware alone were jaw dropping and getting worse as people wanted more email, more stuff, and so on. Renewing aging hardware for the next generation became too much, and outside vendors had better offers, especially considering the better features they could offer.

(My department has its own email system still. It has limits, but also our own features.)

Show threadEdwinOct 29, 2023
@cks @rwg In a similar vein, Cambridge commissioned an internal review of email options, the board of which recommended moving off internally-run university-wide email in a paper that's publicly available (link below). Similarly, this was just for 'central' system that by all intents and purposes has been retired as a mailbox provider (but it's still the outbound mail relay and the target of the University's MX records, for now).

http://web.archive.org/web/20230314103859/https://www.governance.cam.ac.uk/committees/information-services/Documents/Strategic%20Email%20Review%20Findings.pdf

Funnily enough, the headline reason given in favour of Microsoft seems to have been "it'll be easier to implement 2FA in Microsoft 365 than our homegrown systems." Costs and maintenance prowess were also talking points. Anecdotally I think calendaring integration was also wanted.

(For context, the University had at that time migrated some central admin staff to Microsoft already; you could cynically claim that the official review's whole existence was to legitimise a move that was quietly fully underway.)
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