Series: Big Tech Alternatives
tl;dr: There are lots of good reasons to try to minimize your reliance on US Big Tech. Here are some of my considerations.
Introduction
There are plenty of good reasons why you should limit your reliance on Big Tech, by which for the English speaking world I primarily mean Meta (Facebook), Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet (Google), and Apple. China in particular does have its own set of tech giants and different socio-political contexts, and I am not pretending to know enough to be talking about them.
In this post I will touch on some of the good reasons why I am trying to be more intentional about trying to reduce my reliance on those big US tech companies. I will follow up with at least one more post wrestling through specific decisions for various categories of software. As I get into those decisions, I think it will become clear how a lot of these factors sometimes come into conflict with each other. Sometimes achieving a gain in one area means a loss in another and you have to decide which one is more importantly this time.
But that's enough introduction. Here are some of the general ways of thinking for me.
Enshittification
There is the enshittification trap: the more you rely on a closed system, the more trapped you become. They may drastically raise costs, but you don't have a choice because now you rely on it. They may make it even more closed, but since you don't really have any better options you have to accept it. They may shove in even more ads. They may start tracking even more about you. When you're trapped, they can make the product infinitely worse in order to extract just a little more profit and it is very hard to get out.
In other words, I want to give priority to companies that have competition and that have some degree of openness like being able to migrate away to another service without high switching costs.
Wealth Inequality
There's the wealth inequality: do I really want to keep shoving more and more money at the same handful of executives of giant companies? What if we tried to share the love a little to some smaller companies or in support of open source projects?
My general philosophy is that there is some healthy balance. We don't want 10,000 competing email providers. That's impossible to settle on standards and they will probably largely be bad because of it. But we don't want to get down to only 5 providers either, because then they are a cartel with complete control of an essential method of communication. We need just enough consolidation to be able to settle on protocols and standards and push innovation.
I want to give priority to the non-profits, or even to open source developers doing good work largely without thanks, then the smaller or medium companies who are trying to compete against the giants.
Data Privacy and Sovereignty
These Big Tech companies are consolidating a massive amount of information about you and everything you have ever done on the Internet in one place. It is vulnerable to hackers, although I do think that risk is often offset by how these Big Tech companies also often have the best funded security teams to combat them.
The other risk that is becoming more obvious, though, especially to those of us outside the United States, is that governments can demand that data. Some of the tech companies will hold the line more than others, only giving up that data when there is a valid search warrant, but others will immediately hand it over without a second thought. If the companies have the data, authoritarian governments can demand it.
It's also of course possible that the companies will abuse the data themselves, turning their power against the users who empowered them in the first place.
I want to give priority to companies/non-profits/projects that don't store data in the first place, if possible. Failing that, I would rather give data to Canadian companies, followed by European ones, before American ones. There may be some companies from other places like China and Japan, but I'm not sure any that come into play for these specific decisions.
User Friendliness, Accessibility, and Integrations
Big Tech products are often easier to use. They prioritize getting users locked in before they start the enshittification. This is, unfortunately, compared to a lot of open source projects that are made by computer nerds for computer nerds and thus are not very friendly for everyone else.
Accessibility for those with disabilities can also often be a big failure for these small projects, as they see it as something to get around to later. At least the big companies have some baseline of legal compliance they have to meet.
There are often benefits to the integration potential that comes with Big Tech. Sometimes smaller or open source projects can achieve this through open protocols or partnerships rather than market dominance.
There's a certain amount of unfriendliness that I can handle as a tech person myself, but especially if my choice of technology is going to impact others in my life, I do need to give some priority to lowering the amount of user friction.
Innovation
Big Tech may be often at the cutting edge with terrible enshittifying ideas, but they are also often at the edge of new and useful ideas too, before a lot of that does trickle out elsewhere. Sometimes it simply comes down to that none of the more ethical options are offering a feature that I really would benefit from.
Security
Security is still really important, albeit to varying levels depending on the usage and the kind of data being used. Big Tech often does security better. A lot of the time it is the small and medium companies who are failing, because they don't have the budgets and don't have enough attention on them to be really held accountable.
Monetary Costs
It shouldn't be the number one priority, but the financial cost has to be on the list. It is impossible to pay for everything all the time. I will need to accept the free versions of some things, or giving up data instead, or opting out of that category entirely.
I need to think about monetary cost. Big Tech is often free or cheap on the surface, because they make their money from the data instead. If I want privacy, I probably have to pay for it, whether that's with a one-time cost to buy hardware or software, or a subscription fee, or at the very least considerations to give some donations to open source maintainers. Most of us can't afford to pay for all of the things, but I might be able to pay for some more.
That does mean that practically, yes, cheaper is usually better than more expensive, as long as it is still a sustainable business model.
Effort to Switch
I need to think about how long it will take me to migrate. Is it a quick process, a few hours on a weekend, or is a long project that is going to stop me from other things to do with my time? There's only so much time to go around, so I do need to prioritize the ones that I think I can actually finish.
Effort to Maintain
Similarly, how much friction is it going to add to my life on an ongoing basis after that? I might do the one-time long migration project, but I get a lot more cautious once I know that it is going to require an extra hour of my life every week to maintain it.
Network Effects
The biggest variable of all, though, is how my decision might impact others. It's one thing to declare that I will only communicate by Signal from now on. That's fine for me, but if others are not willing to make the same change no matter how effectively I explain all the ethical obligations, I've just said that I will never communicate with them again. What do I do: cut them off? Migrate as many people as I can but accept still using something else like WhatsApp for the rest? Or give up because I don't want to juggle multiple messaging apps and who are in each one, settling for using the most popular one no matter how evil it is? Some of these choices are a little bit in a vacuum with the decisions only impacting myself, but most of them will involve others one way or another.
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