G-Suite

Open Letter to teachers of Kerala

(Updated on 24-Jan-2022 to include an image and a paragraph on how Google’s ads work.)

TL;DR: Google’s free-of-cost offer of G-Suite to Kerala schools is a scheme to make more customers for G-Suite, retain their monopoly power in the ad business and search engines. Dependence on Google can lead to massive surveillance (and its chilling effects), losing our political agency to Google, and many others. We urge educational institutes to reject this offer and switch to free software (freedom-respecting software or swatantra software) for all the activities. For network-based services, we urge institutes to self-host free software powered services. With self-hosting and using free software, the software and the data will be under the institute’s control.