Attacked on one side by Sun and fending off the Justice Department investigation on the other, now Microsoft has to deal with yet more monopoly allegations; this time, it's from a small network of grassroots organizers objecting to Microsoft's push into the California State University system. The community consumer group NetAction Tuesday alerted the public that an upcoming education initiative called CETI will give Microsoft and three other companies a stranglehold on colleges and students.
"They're taking the assets of the universities and turning it over to a private, for-profit consortium," explains Nathan Newman, project director of NetAction. "Microsoft already has made massive inroads [in universities] - to give them 500,000 students in 10 years is giving them a chance to set standards in the minds of the future."
The CETI plan, which has apparently been in the works for around a year, will create a for-profit organization between GTE, Microsoft, Hughes, and Fujitsu to build computer telecommunications systems for the 23 California State University schools. CETI is offering infrastructure and backbones, servers, and databases for the campuses - essentially giving cheap Net access and software services to students and faculty; as a limited liability company, CETI is also anticipated to bring in US$3.12 billion in revenues over the next 10 years for the partners.
The catch, NetAction alleges, is that CETI will give GTE a systemwide telephone monopoly, and Microsoft will become the de facto standard for all campuses: The CETI proposal recommends Windows operating systems, server technology, and the MS Office suite of tools. Furthermore, there are "explicit provisions to give faculty financial incentives to use one technology versus another" - causing professors to endorse only the software and hardware (read: Microsoft) that they are getting discounts on.
"Future programmers, engineers, clerical staff of the future will be trained as Microsoft-only systems," says Nathan Newman. "We don't want the state education systems to become a Microsoft training ground."
Although the campuswide systems are in desperate need of technology, enough students and faculty objections have been registered against CETI since it was announced in August to cause the state legislature to call a hearing on the matter in January. NetAction's action alert is intended to raise the visibility of the issue and hopefully turn the tables on CETI; protests on the part of student groups - including on-campus rallies at San Jose State, Hayward, San Francisco State, and Northridge - are working toward the same cause.
Brian Eby, an organizer of the Anti-CETI group at San Francisco State, has helped gather 17,000 signatures on a petition and has planned a campuswide walkout and teach-in today. According to Eby, most SF State students are worried that they'll have to give up the Macintoshes in their student labs and pay hidden fees for Net access, and are simply terrified of Bill Gates turning their campus into a 3 billion-dollar company. The organizers, along with their teachers, are instead demanding that they be allowed to vote on this decision, and are requesting a year-long postponement.
"They've been working on this for 16 months without telling us," says Eby. "This is our education they're dealing with, not a corporation."
