[FC-discuss] Yale switching to Google Apps / Gmail

[Asheesh Laroia]

On Tue, 9 Feb 2010, Adi Kamdar wrote:

> Hey folks,
>
> The Yale Daily News ran an article today about how there's 
> almost-definite talk about Yale switching to Google Apps for Education 
> and using Google servers/software to host our email.
>
> http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/university-news/2010/02/09/google-run-yale-e-mail/
>
> I was wondering if you guys had any thoughts or good literature on the 
> issues with this (re privacy, data, costs, security, tech, law, etc.). 
> For the most part, the students are overjoyed about this since our old 
> email system is painful to use, so it'd be nice to address usability 
> issues as well.

Hey Adi, this is a great question. I have a few thoughts. I wrote them up 
below, and also re-published them at 
http://www.asheesh.org/note/debian/google-edu-mail.html .

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 by crafty 
pro-Chinese-government hacktivists, described in part at 
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html ). 
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 to 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.

-- Asheesh.

-- 
Minicomputer:
 	A computer that can be afforded on the budget of a middle-level manager.