The use of digital technologies to support or enhance teaching and learning in formal education (“edtech”) has come to mediate or facilitate almost every educational process - from the delivery of teaching to the management of assessment and feedback to facilitating operational issues and providing analytics.

Edetch is, however, first and foremost a business. The global market for edtech products is forecast to reach $370 billion by 2026 (Statista, 2022). The variance however between edtech and other digital industries, the inviolability of edtech, may not be as clear as is often presented. Features of more exploitative digital industries such as “surveillance dividend”, the surveillance capitalism model of extracting data, as identified by Zubof (2019), Killer Acquisitions" (Cunningham, Ederer, & Ma, 2021), Data driven acquisitions (De Cornière & Taylor, 2024) and Doctorow’s concept of enshittification (Doctorow, 2025) are just some of the more disreputable practices within the edtech industry. The presence and push by Artificial Intelligence (AI) companies and research organisations into education systems represents a further blurring between the bearing of edtech companies and silicon valley entities.

This paper will examine some of the elements surrounding and impinging on some of the darker spaces in the edtech landscape. These include regulations and policy which are often slow to, or unable to, grapple with edtech vendors; the solutionism inherent in the peddling of edtech tools, as identified by Teräs et al. (2020) and Boninger, Molnar and Saldaña (2020); and the phenomena of repurposing unpopular or unprofitable technology as a teaching and learning tool to sell to education authorities. The paper will also examine the role of higher education persons and entities in acquiescing or adopting to these infractions and which elements of formal education structures make them susceptible to these incursions.