Swallowed Whole: Big Tech pwns Education

Australian universities now draw more than 40% of their revenue from international students, with billions funneled into research, teaching, and infrastructure, much of it mediated by digital platforms. Government support has shrunk to under 30% of funding, while tech companies capture not only the delivery mechanisms but also the analytics, intellectual property pipelines, and student data streams. The tertiary sector is increasingly locked into corporate ecosystems—cloud contracts, learning management systems, surveillance software—creating a dependence that shapes both pedagogy and policy. What looks like education as a public good is in practice a structural annex of Big Tech, an industry swallowing the sector whole.

Yet this is not a mistake to be corrected so much as a dynamic that sustains itself by its own imbalance. The tethering of education to corporate infrastructure is grotesque, but it is also the very energy that drives the system forward. Dependency itself becomes the mechanism of continuity: the more unhinged the arrangement, the more it guarantees its own persistence. What appears as a catastrophic error is the recursive engine by which meaning, control, and survival are manufactured. The mess is not an accident—it is the structure.