Critical Digital Infrastructures Revealed: Big Tech and Public Education Sector Issues at Stake

• The so-called GAFAM big-tech companies of Google (Alphabet), Amazon, Facebook (Meta), Apple, and Microsoft are well-recognized gatekeepers to critical digital infrastructures in public sectors like education. However, the role they have as pillars within the infrastructure of the internet is commonly invisible to users, not least their “cloud-services” that adopt the so-called “as-a-service” infrastructure model (e.g. STorage-as-a-Service, IDentity-as-a-Service). These cloud-services are highly profitable. For example, in 2021 Amazon Web Services accounted for around 20% of the company's revenue, but nearly 75% of profits (Amazon, n.d.). Thus, the market and social value of these infrastructures motivates the big-tech presence (Birch et al., 2021) and as an increasingly data-intensive sector, public education is an attractive customer. Considering the incentives for expanding cloud-services and the already large infrastructurally installed bases (Star & Ruhleder, 1996) GAFAM companies have in schools, we set out to empirically unpack the ongoing infrastructuring that governs education (Ratner & Gad, 2019; Selwyn, 2015). For this purpose, we have developed a web-based tool, InfraReveal (infrareveal.net), for visualizing the cloud-services underlying educational platforms using techniques that reveal data-packet traffic as users access internet. The tool has been used in sessions with schoolteachers in Sweden with the purpose of enhancing their critical digital infrastructural understandings (part of the RED project focused on global digital education inequalities, edu-digitalinequality.org). While earlier critical studies have considered the influence that GAFAM have on public education through user-facing businesses and through analysis of marketing-technical documentation (e.g. Williamson et al., 2022), we set out to demonstrate and engage with schoolteachers in critical discussions on infrastructuring. Our work builds on the tradition of infrastructure studies focusing on critical infrastructural features such as “ubiquity, reliability, invisibility, gateways, and breakdown” (Plantin et al., 2018: 294), combined with computational methods. The results draw on the real-time visualisations produced by InfraReveal to unpack how and where GAFAM companies are involved in controlling key digital infrastructures for education and achieve market provision dominance. They illustrate the how and where of an increasing dependence on GAFAM that can be argued to be a risk as market logics supersede public sector values (van Dijck et al., 2018), an issue targeted in emerging policy regulations on digital services and markets (European Commission, 2022). Taking the visualizations produced by InfraReveal as a starting point, issues like the role of GAFAM in critical education infrastructures, global infrastructural inequalities affecting education, and the lack of public debate on Sweden’s marketized cloud-service school infrastructure are discussed. References Amazon. (n.d.). Quarterly results. Amazon.com, Inc. Retrieved Jan 17 2023, from https://ir.aboutamazon.com/quarterly-results/default.aspx Birch, K., Cochrane, D., & Ward, C. (2021). Data as Asset? The Measurement, Governance, and Valuation of Digital Personal Data by Big Tech. Big Data & Society, 8(1). European Commission (2022). Regulation on Digital Services Act. http://data.europa.eu/eli/reg/2022/2065/oj Plantin, J. C., Lagoze, C., Edwards, P. N., & Sandvig, C. (2018). Infrastructure Studies Meet Platform Studies in the Age of Google and Facebook. New Media & Society, 20(1), 293–310. Ratner, H., & Gad, C. (2019). Data Warehousing Organization: Infrastructural Experimentation with Educational Governance. Organization 26(4), 537–552. Selwyn, N. (2015). Data Entry: Towards the Critical Study of Digital Data and Education. Learning, Media and Technology 40(1), 64–82. Star, S.L., & Ruhleder, K. (1996). Steps Toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information Spaces. Information Systems Research 7, 111–134. van Dijck, J., Poell, T., & de Waal, M. (2018). The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World. Oxford University Press. Williamson, B., Gulson, K. N., Perotta, C., & Witzenberger, K. (2022). Amazon and the New Global Connective Architectures of Education Governance. Harvard Educational Review, 92(2), 231–256.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Utbildningsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Educational Sciences (hsv//eng)

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Annan teknik -- Interaktionsteknik (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Other Engineering and Technologies -- Interaction Technologies (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Annan samhällsvetenskap -- Tvärvetenskapliga studier inom samhällsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Other Social Sciences -- Social Sciences Interdisciplinary (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Digital infrastructures; Big Tech; Public sector; Education; Educational Technology; Visualisation; Critical Engagement; Teachers

Publikations- och innehållstyp

vet (ämneskategori)

kon (ämneskategori)