Even before COVID-19 closed higher education (HE) classrooms in 2020 and spurred a mass shift to remote emergency teaching, universities had used online platforms and invested in relationships with private sector educational technology (EdTech) providers. From the 2010s in the USA, universities developed free massive open online courses (MOOCs) and fully online degrees with firms like Silicon Valley for-profit Coursera. Where these delivered commercial or reputational success, faculty instructors imagined them as templates for later teaching online HE courses at scale. Yet when large-scale online teaching arrived with the pandemic such approaches were largely side-lined and platforms like Zoom were used instead to simply broadcast live classes. We critically explore preconditions for this by reconsidering dependencies of pre-pandemic faculty within five US university/EdTech platform cases. This revisits late-2017 interviews at US universities highly active with free MOOCs, fully online degrees and one EdTech-enabled start-up university. We reveal faculty (in)dependence already largely pre-set by factors of: instructor roles; reputations; job security; platform delivery, interactivity, assessment and certification; career sector; how fast course materials refresh; and instruction language. Pre-pandemic platform independence was already difficult for these individual faculty instructors to achieve within their universities and the larger political economy of platforms.