Do universities dare to let go of big tech? Corien Prins: ‘What are you willing to sacrifice?’

Dutch universities are dependent on American and Chinese technology. Academic values can come under pressure as a result. Professor and WRR chair Corien Prins argues for a digital independence day.

It is ironic, of course, Corien Prins immediately agrees, to make a plea against the colonization of big tech via an online connection of such an American platform. Prins: ‘You invite me to do this interview via Teams, but we also have a pilot at the university that works with Nextcloud, a German system as an alternative to Microsoft.’

‘You can also use it to make video calls, but many people at our university don’t know that system,’ says Prins. “Moreover, Microsoft is of better quality compared to the alternative. So, the question is, and I think this is a particularly important one,’ Prins kicks off, ‘do we settle for a little less quality to get more independence in return?’

In a  2022 interview with Univers, Prins, in addition to being a professor of Law and Informatization at Tilburg University also chairman of the Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR), spoke critically about the digital dependence of our society. In her view, politics and society were far too naïve and wait-and-see when it comes to the digitization and platformization of society.

Even more dependent?

Since 2022, her worries have only increased. Silicon Valley has shown its opportunistic side by jumping on the train of Donald Trump’s politics. Companies like Meta, Google and X stopped moderating their platforms and they continue to stuff their apps with addictive algorithms.

Top it all off, the new AI technology is rapidly penetrating the capillaries of our daily lives, slurping up more and more personal data, which the platforms then use to make us even more dependent on their services.

Prins is not necessarily against the use of AI: ‘We educate young people in a world in which AI is a tool. So, we cannot say: We are not going to use AI. But we also want to maintain a certain degree of independence and be able to cherish our own values about privacy, freedom of education and independence of research.’

Awake

Since Trump’s new term as president, Corien Prins’ call does seem to be heard, as alarm bells are ringing all over the world, and especially in Europe. For example, the imminent sale of the company behind DigiD to the Americans raises many questions about privacy, as does the influence of China through cheap solar panels, electric cars and smart meters.

‘I can really see that we are waking up’, says Prins. There are alternatives available. She is referring to SURF, the network of the joint universities, colleges, and academic hospitals, among others. It is a ‘digital ecosystem’ that has been around for a long time and that includes all kinds of services, such as campus networks, digital security and storage and data management. Moreover, universities are busy developing their own AI environments, such as Tilly van Tilburg.ai.

Convenience

Prins: ‘SURF offers good facilities to become less dependent. So, we must make sure that we develop applications and environments ourselves, whether we do so together with SURF. Fortunately, that is already happening. But is it going fast enough, is the quality sufficient and do we know how to find each other to achieve the necessary scale?

And then we should also make use of those alternatives, Prins thinks: ‘Suppose we conduct a poll among lecturers and researchers: Who uses Copilot or ChatGPT? Then you get a score of ninety percent,’ Prins estimates. ‘We must get rid of big tech, I hear colleagues shouting, but then I think: ‘Start doing that yourself.’

Ban?

Prins: ‘It is easy to say in general that big tech should be banned. But you know what a much more complicated question is? Do we think that management, for example our Executive Board, should prohibit lecturers and researchers from using ChatGPT or Copilot, because researchers themselves argue that big tech should be banned?’

Prins herself already gives an advance on an answer: ‘The argument of my colleagues may be: ‘That is not possible, because as a teacher I have the freedom to decide on the instruments I use for my teaching, right?’ But what are you willing to sacrifice?’

Values

Dependence on foreign tech companies could also put civil rights and freedoms under pressure in Europe. What can be done about that? Haven’t we been a digital colony of the United States for a long time? Because the dependence on American cloud services continues to grow, as the Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) recently warned.

Prins: ‘The term ecosystem is a crucial term for me. If we are not careful, we will be caught in the pincers of entire ecosystems. The cloud is not just data storage. Cloud companies have long been working to make us dependent on all kinds of AI applications they offer, and they can train their AI models because we use their cloud services en masse.

‘And we use numerous apps in education using our smartphones. It is precisely in the combination of products, services and our use and dependence on them that we become entangled in an ecosystem dominated by big tech,’ says Prins.

WRR

The government must be sensitive to what is different about new technology and […] if that weakens the citizen’s position, then the government must do something about it,’  Prins stated in 2022. That is also the starting point of the WRR’s recommendations.

Of course, as chair of the WRR, Corien Prins also has some influence on government policy: ‘The government is already a bit awake. Just before Christmas, the Wennink report was published with the title The route to future prosperity. Wennink (former ASML CEO Peter Wennink, ed.) calls on the cabinet to invest heavily  in technological independence. So, there is certainly an eye for it.’

Autonomy

Prins: ‘And around next summer, we as WRR will present a report on strategic autonomy, which can serve as a supplement to Wennink’s report. In a widely supported parliamentary motion by Bikker two years ago, the House of Representatives asked the WRR to advise on safeguarding public values in the light of major transitions. The digital transition is one of them, and so is the energy transition.’

But shouldn’t the government do more to protect citizens against the excesses of big tech? Or do we have to be patient? Prins: ‘The government absolutely must act, we cannot be patient with that. What we as a society must be patient with is the alternative that we want to develop ourselves. We cannot expect that tomorrow there will be digital applications with the quality we are used to.’

Independence Day

‘We have knowingly opted for an almost entirely American digital infrastructure and made ourselves largely dependent on Microsoft,’ says Prins. ‘That’s why I think it’s crucial that there is a different mindset, also at the university,’ she emphasizes again.

‘We need to create a vanguard of people who are at the forefront of the use of alternative ecosystems,’ Prins concludes. ‘We must start a conversation with each other, also with students, with the whole community. You could organize a day at the beginning of the academic year on this subject. Just call it a big tech independence day,’ Prins laughs, ‘with the whole community, to inspire and motivate each other.’

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