European universities should reassess their dependence on IT services offered by US tech companies, scholars have warned, as the Trump administration targets research in fields including climate, public health and any areas considered to be related to diversity.
In the first months of Trump’s second term, thousands of research articles, papers and data sets have already been taken down from government websites, with researchers scrambling to preserve access to crucial scientific resources. But institutions outside the US should also be paying heed to their dependence on cloud infrastructure and other IT services, experts say, because many rely on products from companies such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft.
“Reliance on large, centralised cloud service providers can be problematic due to issues related to service volatility, policy shifts, and jurisdictional control over data,” said Simran Munot, a PhD candidate at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics.
Through legislation such as the Patriot Act, federal authorities may also access the data stored by US-based cloud providers, she added, which “raises substantial concerns about data sovereignty, confidentiality and institutional control”.
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The risk of such dependency predates the second Trump term, Munot noted, pointing to Google’s 2021 announcement that academic institutions would no longer receive unlimited storage but would be restricted instead to 100TB.
The move “forced universities to significantly reduce their data footprint and implement data restrictions,” she said. “Such abrupt policies illustrate the risks associated with heavy dependence on external providers for critical infrastructure.”
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Fellow Max Planck researcher Tobias Fiebig co-authored a 2021 study into universities’ move to public cloud infrastructures, investigating the uptake in the Netherlands, Germany, France, Austria, Switzerland, the UK and the US.
“There was a stark difference in the degree of dependence,” Fiebig told Times Higher Education. While German, French and Australia universities were “generally less dependent”, Dutch, US and UK universities “seemed to go more ‘all in’”.
Universities “used to be mostly self-sufficient when it comes to IT services, often leading developments,” Fiebig said. The past decade saw an increasing transition to large cloud service providers, “often in an attempt to ‘save costs’ and ‘make things more efficient’”.
Citing open-source software as a potential alternative, Munot described potential advantages including “cost predictability, greater transparency and the flexibility to adapt or customise systems in response to their institutional needs”. She pointed to the University of Osnabrück as an example of an institution employing this approach.
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Fleur Zeldenrust, an associate professor at Radboud University, said many institutions in the Netherlands “have moved completely to big tech providers” such as Microsoft or Google. “These services are easy to use; they have a smooth user experience. It’s not un-understandable why they did that.”
“There’s a balance to be made,” Zeldenrust said. “We want to keep autonomy over our data. We have to ask: who has access to it, where is it stored, who owns it? There’s a value-based discussion there that has been ignored for a long time.
“I don’t think there’s a ‘one size fits all solution’ here,” she continued. “But there is a discussion that needs to be held on a much broader scale about all these technical applications that we use.”
Such discussions are increasingly taking place, Fiebig said, telling THE, “With the second Trump presidency, the risks [of depending on US providers] certainly did not change.”
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“What did, however, change is people’s willingness to see that these risks are indeed real, and increasingly likely to materialise.”
emily.dixon
