Knowledge as Infrastructure: The Economy of Private Ownership in Digital Academia

Abstract

This thesis examines the governance failures produced by the increasing privatization of digital knowledge infrastructure in higher education. As academic publishing, learning management systems, and research tools consolidate under a small number of private firms, the shared resources that sustain scholarly communication and learning face conditions that resemble Common-Pool Resource dilemmas as described by Elinor Ostrom. The central argument is that academic knowledge production functions as a knowledge commons, and that private control over the platforms supporting it introduces structural governance failures that threaten the sustainability of open scholarship.

The analysis applies Ostrom’s Institutional Analysis and Development framework to map the actors, rules, and incentive structures that shape how academic platforms operate. It draws on Ostrom’s design principles for sustainable commons institutions to evaluate governance failures in the learning management system market, with particular attention to data collection practices, vendor accountability, and the erosion of institutional rule-making authority. Robert Axelrod’s cooperation theory is used to explain why the current arrangement persists and what conditions would be necessary to change it. Primary interview data collected from a Director of Digital Learning at the University of Washington Tacoma supplements published sources and provides an institutional perspective on vendor dependency, AI integration, and the challenges of building self-hosted alternatives.

The thesis finds that privatized digital knowledge infrastructure consistently violates the governance conditions that Ostrom identifies as essential to commons sustainability. Consolidated vendors concentrate monitoring authority and rule-making power while academic institutions, operating under uneven funding recovery from the 2008 recession, have limited capacity to build or negotiate alternatives. Recent events including the Anthology Inc. bankruptcy and the Amazon Web Services outage of October 2025 illustrate the concrete risks of this dependency.

The paper recommends several interventions. It argues for platform-neutral and adaptable institutional governance frameworks, enforceable vendor accountability mechanisms, and investment in open-source and cooperative infrastructure alternatives. It also proposes a structured work-study or apprenticeship model in which students maintain the digital infrastructure they depend on, connecting community governance principles to practical institutional labor needs. These recommendations are grounded in existing cooperative models including the Public Library of Science, arXiv, and Moodle, and are framed as actionable directions for both institutional practice and future research.