"Turning Children Into Lifelong Customers"

I saw this interesting but unfortunately not too surprising post from NBC News titled "Google's work in schools aims to create a 'pipeline of future users,' internal documents say" The post focuses on some of Google's internal documents that were filed as part of a major lawsuit in which families, school districts and state attorneys general are suing several technology giants, Meta, ByteDance, Snap and Google, claiming that the corporations purposely marketed addictive and damaging social media to children. The case appears to focus on Google's YouTube platform, but reference is also made to Google Chromebook dominance in the classroom and with over 170 million students and educators worldwide relying on their suite of tools through Google Workspace for Education. 

What I found interesting, but as I said earlier, not surprising, is that article clearly highlights "how Google viewed its work with schools as a way of turning children into lifelong customers", how their growing presence in schools through their solutions mentioned above, provided a "pipeline of future users," and also by 

"acclimating children to Google’s ecosystem in school would hopefully lead them to use its products as adults: "You get that loyalty early, and potentially for life.""

This got me thinking about our reliance on both Google and Microsoft here in Wales. Pernille Tranberg, a co-founder at Data Ethics, a Danish nonprofit think tank, paints a bleak picture of the Danish school system, who like Wales, mainly use Google and Microsoft who said, “We’re bringing up Google soldiers and Microsoft soldiers.” We appear to be doing the same as Denmark and others countries in arguably creating this pipeline of lifelong Google and Microsoft soldiers. I'm sure it's not intentional and this situation has been created because these digital platforms offered by both Google and Microsoft are convenient for governments in providing a technology solution to its schools. In fact, the Welsh Government are proud of the fact that we were "one of the first countries in the world to provide all maintained schools with access to Microsoft 365 services back in 2019." In doing so, see it as "removing barriers to technology,"and helping our learners "grow into confident, creative and critical users of digital services, ready to thrive in a global digital society." I'm sure they also see the benefits in providing schools with a national approach, integrating collaboration and communication across all schools in Wales, also taking the technical burden off those schools who wouldn't have the technical expertise to effectively run their own instance (particularly in primary schools) and lowering the cost of the licenses. All worthy benefits to many schools and learners. But let's play devil's advocate for a moment, and questions at what cost to our learners and to schools is that convenience? Have they potentially tied in both their schools and our learners to a commercial product from the two tech behemoths? Well, as we can now see Google believes so and you can bet your bottom dollar that that is exactly how Microsoft privately sees it too.

I've been racking my brain to think of another example in the state maintained school sector where we are basically marketing and training our learners, in many instances from age of 7 onwards, on commercial products that basically boil down to two options, Microsoft 365 or Google. I find it interesting that while the digital competence framework (DCF) does not explicitly recommend any particular application, it could be argued that many of the descriptions of learning, especially in both the Citizenship and Interacting & Collaborating strands, from PS2 onwards (age 7+), could not in many instances, be addressed without schools using Google or Microsoft 365 cloud applications. I know there are other solutions available that could be considered, for example I've been a Proton user myself for many years which is a cloud platform with file storage, email, collaborative docs, etc. and is based in Europe (more of which I'll come onto shortly). But considering other options is difficult when the Welsh Government are "encouraging" schools to "consider the benefits of adopting a national approach" through Hwb, it probably leaves the majority of schools (especially primary schools) unable or reluctant to look for different solutions, especially open source or non-US products. 

Why do I mention non-US products? Well it does appear that countries and many users around the world are suddenly waking up to the fact that US based tech like Google, Microsoft, along with Meta, Amazon, Netflix, to name a few, dominate all our digital lives - entertainment, communication, social media, banking infrastructure, generative AI, commerce, and even applications that we use that are not US based are often reliant on US cloud servers such as Amazon Web Servers, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform which appear to dominate the cloud server market. This dominance is potentially a big problem for governments around the world, especially at the time when the current US government is seen to be using this tech power to leverage concessions with its trading partners. A warning to all about the power of the big tech companies was recently demonstrated when Microsoft removed the accounts of some of the judges at the International Criminal Court. As well as removing their Microsoft accounts, access was also removed to their credit cards and even Amazon Alexa which stopped responding for one of the judges! This piece in the Guardian sums the current situation up well. 

"Living in Europe is no protection against Donald Trump bricking your digital life."

Also, it's not just the potential issue with access to US digital applications or platforms, it could affect your US digital devices too. The Guardian reported that:

"The chairman of the Danish parliament’s defence committee said that he regretted his part in Denmark’s decision to buy US-made F-35 fighter jets: “I can easily imagine a situation where the USA will demand Greenland from Denmark and will threaten to deactivate our weapons and let Russia attack us when we refuse. Buying American weapons is a security risk that we can not run.” He is not alone. Spain has abandoned plans to buy F-35s."

If you think this might not happen, read this piece from Cory Doctorow about the 'kill switch' on John Deere tractors. It should make you think about the consequences of a company 'bricking' any digital device you may own. The ICC have recently announced that they are now moving away from Microsoft 365 along with several other European government who are ditching US tech over security fears and digital sovereignty has become central to many governments thoughts. 

So, let's go from the wider geopolitical view of digital technologies and back to our learners and our schools. What does all this mean? To be clear, there are certainly benefits to our schools in having the national, uniform approach to the use of digital technologies in our schools, some of which I mentioned above. However, I believe that there are also concerns about limiting the variety of applications that are available to our schools and the fact that we are promoting and training our learners on one or two US based cloud solutions, creating that "pipeline of future users" for two of the biggest companies in the world. 

Here are some points I'm now starting to think about.

• Vendor lock in - our learners (and teachers) become accustomed to Google and Microsoft at an early age, making it more difficult to switch at a later stage or even to be aware that there might be other solutions available. Increasingly, primary schools are embedding Microsoft 365 into their school workflow - email, Teams, cloud storage, document creation and collaboration. The more they use it, the greater the difficulty for them in extracting themselves from it at some point in the future - therefore they are Microsoft customers for life.  
• Commercial influence - resources or lesson plans can subtly promote an application e.g use Word Online or create a Google Classroom Assignment. It's easy for our classrooms to become a marketing channel for both companies.
• Limited digital competence and lack of choice - is learning being framed around proprietary features rather than broader skills? Are learners being exposed to a wider variety of 'productivity' tools, not just Google or Microsoft? Does Hwb, more generally, limit schools' digital choice? To keep things simple in schools, is it possible to have single sign on through Hwb to other digital solutions that a school may want to use?
• Data privacy and surveillance - On the surface, both Google and Microsoft say that users data is private, that they would not receive advertisements and that users data would not be used to train AI foundation models. However, both companies have had complaints aimed at them accusing them of opaque data practices and a "serious lack of transparency, forcing users and schools to navigate a maze of privacy policies, documents, terms and contracts that all seem to apply." In January 2026, the Austrian Data Protection Authority ordered Microsoft to stop tracking school children using non-essential cookies in their education software. However, arguably the bigger concern would be that schools are creating the pipeline to "lifelong customers" of their consumer products. Is that what we should be promoting in education? 
• Future regulatory pressures - based on the current scrutiny being placed on US tech by many governments, could there possibly be a future where schools face mandates to move away from particular digital solutions? Has our education department thought about such an eventually and what that might mean for our schools and learners?