All schools in North America are beholden to Google. This shouldn't be news, although it probably is to some. Google has been lobbying and cutting deals every government and school board it can get its hooks on for a couple decades. They make the old Apple Education program look insignificant.

Should we trust them? No. Do we have an alternative? Also no. I want you to consider the scale of the problem here. The Chromebook itself is sold nearly at cost and often below cost. Why? Because Google isn't making money off the Chromebook. It's just a gateway to a massive networked ecosystem of software products and services. They're called "Big Tech" for a reason, the massive scale of operation necessary to build out something like their education program would take trillions of dollars in today's economy. If we spent a third of our national GDP trying to build something equivalent on our own terms, we might catch up to with where Google is today in 10 years or so, and we'd have to fund it entirely publicly, because no one in their right mind is going to invest in a private competitor that's primary use case is a market 1/10th the size of the US.

Is it doable? Yes. Is it cheap, easy, or fast? Absolutely not. Is it worth it? Maybe??? Can we maybe cut a deal with the EU and their new data sovereignty initiative and make it happen a bit faster and cheaper? Yeah, that might work.