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The main problem is that far too many Europeans mindlessly cling to everything google. There are plenty of suitable European alternatives. Probably not for every use case, but more than enough to grow European tech and support European business. https://buy-european.net/en/alternatives
For personal use, maybe, but right now there aren't any replacements for things like AWS, Azure, GC. Imagine being the architect telling a company to go with eurocloud inc because it fits the current specs only to have to tell them a year later that they either can't grow their business because the chosen solution doesn't do what AWS does, or that they have to spend money on migrating to one of the big three?
I want a law that prevents EU PII data from leaving the EU without explicit consent from all the countries of affected citizens, applied to public contracts starting in 2030, with private companies starting in 2035. That would exclude the big three until they make fundamental changes, if at all possible given US law, and give European cloud providers the money to build their business.
There are plenty of european alternatives and for services you can self host plenty. I use an iphone because of an unfortunate circumstance - which I deeply despise - but I turned off icloud and I fully self host everything: immich for photo video, baikal for val/card dav sync, i use tuta mail, etc.
Stopping using big tech is perfectly doable, you just have to want it enough. Start self hosting of cloud host with european providers and offer it to family and friends.
Doable for personal use yes, but not really in a professional setting. I wish there was, but there isn't right now, and there won't be until a critical mass is there, which is why I want the EU to put the pressure on organisations to change.
The whole world runs on O365, except you, and then you get an excel from a colleague that does a lot of semi complicated maths to help you with your real job, now will you trust that LibreOffice does a good enough job in converting those macros, especially since it could have real world consequences, or will you just pay for a licence? Or create a great presentation for your boss in OpenOffic, only for it to look like shit when he presents it to his boss. Not to mention all application that users Ms office components as backend.
There are tons of examples like this.
I'm an open source/free software guy, but in the business world it's going to take legislation to get anything done I'm afraid.
I agree that on a corporate or small business level even, it’s mostly big tech backing the while thing, but lots of decision makers are incredibly narrow minded and would refuse any alternatives that doesn’t fit the tech status quo, so yeah, that will take a lot longer for sure, but we can at least start small and promote alternatives when possible.
It might be just wishful thinking on my part here though and people don’t really give many shits because of random reasons, which might or might not be valid.
I'm all for it. But it's hard, just try to get your friends over to Signal from any of the un-free alternatives is a pain, and that's just for messages. It annoyed me immensely when they removed the SMS-functionality from it. Being able to use ONE app for both was the killer feature there. It went from hard to convince people to fscking impossible.