Dear AoIRers, long time lurker, first time poster*. A recent inquiry to the list asking for non-Zoom platforms gave me the idea to ask advice here regarding a project for an opinion piece I have about the recent taking over of online conferencing by Zoom (and Microsoft Teams) in Academia. My point is that the Covid crisis has led (in France at least, and I'm willing to have the opinion about academics in other countries) to the complete outsourcing to those two corporate platforms for online teaching (and scholarly conferencing), which means 1) the renouncement to a once functional dedicated national infrastructure (namely, in France, the use of free software Jitsi within the state-sponsored "Renater" academic infrastructure) 2) the surrendering of Academia to corporations well known to abuse the extraction and commodification of data (Zoom) and well known to "embrace, extend and extinguish" anything within their reach (Microsoft) My point is that it is completely contradictory to a supposed general institutional trend towards "open science", and that open software is often forgotten besides open litterature and open data, and that the pandemic has accelerated the disintegration of an academic national and open infrastructure. So my questions are : 1) Is anybody aware of an already existing piece expressing that concerns ? 2) Is anybody willing to share what is the situation in their country regarding this issue ? Best, * for a little background and as a newcomer presentation, I am a historian of science and my area is the issue of openness within scientific modelling software . -- *********************************************** Alexandre Hocquet Archives Henri Poincaré & Science History Institute Alexandre.Hocquet@univ-lorraine.fr https://www.sciencehistory.org/profile/alexandre-hocquet https://poincare.univ-lorraine.fr/fr/membre-titulaire/alexandre-hocquet ***********************************************