Wed, 10 Feb 2010
Google and University email
Should universities switch away from hosting their own email and join the Google bandwagon?
Adi Kamdar wrote to the Students for Free Culture discussion mailing list linking us to a Yale Daily News article discussing an "almost-definite" switch for Yale to Google Apps for Education.
Adi asked for thoughts, so here are mine.
Privacy
One interesting thing about the Gmail option is that, when deployed for all students, students have no choice but to let Google read their official email.
Some students might take part in activism that they want to shield from Google, a corporation with its own interests, or the attackers that attempt to break into Google's systems (see the recent attacks from crafty pro-Chinese-government hacktivists). Before a switch to Gmail, each student could choose if Google was the kind of company they wanted to share their email with. After a switch to Google Apps, the choice is made for them.
But this highlights a different issue: Before a switch to Google, students have no choice but to let university administrators read their official email. That's not necessarily optimal, either. Others have pointed out in this thread that this option comes with legal advantages with regard to privacy law. At least that's some consolation.
It's still true that students can encrypt their email and make it difficult for any eavesdropper to figure out the bodies of their emails. But that's no use for hiding the identities of the people with whom they communicate -- no email crypto I know hides email addresses.
Software freedom and open standards
This is juxtaposed against another difficult situation: Matt Senate wrote about the sucky Squirrelmail system that Berkeley uses (used?) for webmail. The fact that SquirrelMail is Free Software is small consolation for Matt. From his perspective, because it's a hosted web application, he has no more freedom than he would have with Gmail.
At least Berkeley's IMAP server followed standards! That's more than we can say for the Gmail IMAP server, which is famous for basically supporting just enough IMAP for Microsoft Outlook to work.
But standards compliance is small consolation. If the university email server "properly" supports IMAP, but isn't fast or doesn't provide the new extensions that make threading or search speedy, it's not much relief to know that you can use any client you want to slowly read your email.
Internet history
Truth be told, University-hosted Internet services are based on what you might call the original Internet perspective. The Internet began as a network of networks. A University was a network island unto itself, running its own email, news, and Ethernet services. When inter-network connection was available, you can email people at other institutions. When it wasn't, well -- the Internet is a useful tool, but it's down right now. "Don't worry," the admins might tell you, "you can still read your email with PINE."
It used to be that inter-network connectivity was icing on top of the "real" network a person used.
Today, inter-network connectivity is the whole point of a network connection. How embarrassing for each individual network! To test if our connections are working, we skip right over the local content and point our web browsers at a search engine.
Users today aren't satisfied to read their email from imap.institution.edu and read USENET news-- they thirst for real-time access resources available beyond the university. Students weren't interested in the J-Stream service I helped set up at Johns Hopkins; instead they mostly posted and watched videos at YouTube. They don't really care if the the student-oriented wiki is based on campus or instead halfway across the globe (say, in Japan).
The original Internet was based on autonomous networks and opt-in routing. But eventually, all the networks opted in. Users drive everything, and when they don't get what they want, they vote with their feet. Companies like Facebook and Google stand ready and armed to provide shockingly-efficient services to millions of users who choose them. You could say that with today's network, the autonomy shifted from the network to the users.
The nice thing about University-run services is that students can organize and ask for changes, as Fred pointed out. And for people like me, there's something nice about knowing the person who runs your email system.
But if your busy university staff doesn't have time to investigate an email server with fast full-text indexing, you might wish for change. Having the university tear down its internal services is a progression toward seeing its network as simply transit.
Imagine the loss of pride. It used to be that the university personally ran a system for helping users get what they wanted. As it becomes simply transit, the staff are just greasing the cogs of a larger, invisible machine that's easy for users take for granted.
Some netizens like me hold email as sacred, a beautiful institution based on standards and a decision to interoperate. When your university switches to Gmail, I'll be sadder, but maybe what you'll get is professors who can spend more time with students and less time configuring desktop software.
Trade offs
Every university has a choice: Pay hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars a year for dedicated staff to run an in-house email system, or let Google do it. Think for a moment of what good could come from those dollars when put to use in other ways for students.
Your school could start a switch to all-organic food. It could start paying more of its employees a living wage. Imagine the travel funding for student activities that can come from hundreds of thousands a year well-spent. It could run a massive used textbook clearinghouse to help students avoid pouring their dollars into the textbook industry.
And now cry with me. What I've asked you do is to consider sacrificing institutional autonomy for cold, hard cash. That's to say nothing of the ecological benefits or the productivity increases possible from having Google's paid experts run this part of the computing system.
Conclusion
Is an official Google email system much different than the reality most students I know live, which is configuring their student email address to forward to gmail.com?
For those of us who would be sadder with one more push toward centralizing email with Google -- for those who see it as the behemoth whose size threatens the decentralization that used to be the core of the Internet -- I ask you to think positive. "See the profit from your loss."
I have no conclusions for you, just niggling questions.
