Can you please advise whether any of the servers that host iTunes are located in Canada?
Because of the issues associated with the Patriot Act, it would be desirable for Canadian Universities to acquire hosted services from servers located from within Canada.
I, of course, utterly defer to Apple on this ... and I'm kind of reluctant to add my humble opinion, to be honest ... but I am not sure there is a way to sufficiently set your mind at ease.
Just for chuckles, let's say Apple could accomodate your reuqest ... by hosting your content on sites located in Canada. Now consider the student/faculty member who visits the USofA for whatever reason ... and let's say this person downloads subversive content whilst in our fair country. The problem for this person is that he/she is in the US using local wires (even if content is hosted in Canada). So you are going to have to warn people ("Don't use iTunes U if you leave Canada!"). But there is always someone who will forget. You probably already face this issue with users who travel to, say, China or Iran ... places with restrictions on what can be viewed online.
Even for someone within Canada, you can never be sure how the Internet is going to route packets between Apple's Canadian servers and that person ... maybe those packets will go through PIttsburgh or Dallas. Add caching servers to the mix and things get even dicier. I wouldn't at all be surprised to learn that packets routed from Yellowknife to Prince Edward Island cache their way through Detriot. 🙂
MacBook Pro Mac OS X (10.4.8) I lied. I'm running Leopard
