How To Break Free Of Digital & Internet Monopolies

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Amazon, Google, X, Meta, Apple, and other tech giants dominate digital communications. From online shopping to e-mail to smartphone apps, they suck up our online experiences and turn them into marketable packages that allow advertisers, influencers, and scammers to profit from our digital activities.

Jeff Bezos was one of the first digital entrepreneurs to leverage the digital shadow we leave behind when we go online to boost sales. Amazon, which began as an online book store, had very little interest in selling books. But it was very interested in collecting data on what books you searched for and used that information to build a profile on everyone who logged on to the Amazon website.

It put that metadata to work to suggest other products people might like and developed custom ad campaigns to convince people to order more products from Amazon.

Guardian contributor Steve Rose says there are alternatives to the tech giants that offer more privacy, but it takes some searching to find them. And not all of them are “free” in the way Google, X, Meta, and Apple tend to be. The tech companies have smoothed the path to digital dominance with seemingly free services — there is no cost for using Gmail, for instance. But people are becoming more aware how their digital portfolio is being built and preserved in order to push more “stuff” their way and some are interested in alternatives.

Tech writer Lisa Barber told Rose, “While it’s brilliant to have access to high quality products and software, very often for ‘free’, it’s important to remember that there is a trade-off involved — often of our personal data and privacy.”

According to Rose, the good news is that we can look elsewhere for the tech services we crave. “The rest of the world is weighing up its reliance on US technologies, and in Europe especially we’re realizing there are better alternatives to just about everything big tech is shilling — if by better we mean greener, more ethical, more independent, more respectful of your privacy or simply less disturbingly, monolithically powerful. Making the switch is easier than you might imagine,” he says.

Search Engine Options

Google sits astride the internet search ecosystem like a Colossus and controls fully 90% of search functions globally. Cory Doctorow has called Google “the poster child for enshittification” because of its alleged strategy of making search quality worse so that users spend more time on the site. Fortunately, changing the default search engine on any device is extremely easy.

Rose says, “I’ve been using Ecosia for years. Instead of using your searches to fill corporate coffers, it uses them to plant trees.” Based in Berlin, it claims to have planted nearly 250 million trees since it launched in 2009. So far, it has committed 100% of its profits to climate action — over €100 million to date. It produces more clean energy than it consumes via its own solar plants and collects minimal data on its users.

Another alternative is Mojeek, based in the UK, whose search results are 100% independent of Google or Bing. It promises not to track users or collect information on them, so everyone gets exactly the same search results. French company Qwant is also privacy-oriented. Its slogan is “The search engine that values you as a user, not as a product.” It is now partnering with Ecosia to build a new “European search index.”

Browser Choices

Chrome, Safari, and Edge are by far the most frequently used browsers and together account for about 90% of the market. “Our browsing activity enables these corporations to accumulate vast amounts of data on our personal habits, all the better to market to advertisers or third parties.” Rose says.

There are alternatives. Mozilla Firefox is open source and relatively secure and private. An even more private — but still free and equally effective — version of Firefox is LibreWolf.

Opera founder Jon von Tetzchner recently launched a new, independent browser called Vivaldi. Based in Norway and Iceland, “where privacy rules are strong — so your data is away from big tech’s insatiable appetite for your personal information to sell to advertisers,” Vivaldi claims to have 4 million users worldwide. It is highly customizable and a reviewer for PC World said, “There’s nothing I want to do with Vivaldi that I can’t, and nothing that it wants me to do that it insists upon.”

Email

The top three email providers, Apple iCloud, Google Gmail, and Microsoft Outlook, control about three-quarters of all email, primarily because they are well integrated into those companies’ other products. Rose says they are highly invasive because they track your activity in order to build a digital profile of their users. But there are options that are more private and secure that do basically the same things.

More than 100 million people use Proton Mail, whose motto is, “A better internet starts with privacy and freedom.” Based in Switzerland, it promises stronger end to end encryption than Gmail or Outlook. New subscribers receive a message from Proton that tells you how to “set up automatic forwarding from Gmail in one click.”

“Free” comes with some constraints, however. Where Gmail offers 15 GB of free storage, Proton offers just 1GB. User can opt for up to 1 TB — for a fee. That’s normal says Ruaridh Fraser, tech writer and reviewer at Ethical Consumer. “If you’re not selling data, you need to get money somewhere else. But a lot of people might quite reasonably feel that, actually, £1 a month is very worth it.”

There are other alternatives. Germany’s Tuta claims to be powered by 100% renewable energy and has a robust privacy policy. GreenNet in the UK also claims to use 100% renewables and to be oriented toward sustainability. It costs £60 a year, but it achieved the highest ranking from Ethical Consumer recently. Gmail and Outlook both scored zero.

An Alternative To Microsoft Office

Almost all internet users have been exposed to the Microsoft Office suite of online tools — Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. Many of them, including Austria’s military and local governments in Germany and France, are switching to LibreOffice, created by The Document Foundation in Berlin. Businesses and individuals are doing the same. Ethical Consumer has used LibreOffice for some time, says Fraser. “It’s an open source version of Word, and all of the Office tools. It works and looks basically the same.”

A Smarter Smartphone

It’s hard to believe, but there are smartphone manufacturers other than Apple, Samsung, and Google. Fairphone in the Netherlands has products that are consistently well reviewed. The brand scored an impressive 98 out of 100 in a recent Ethical Consumer survey, which ranks factors such as climate policies, conflict minerals, company ethics, and reuse and repairability. In that survey, Apple scored 25 and Samsung 17.

“Fairphone for us is the clear winner,” says Fraser. When conflict minerals and exploitative supply chains became an issue about 10 years ago, he explains, most companies responded with superficial measures, but “Fairphone chose to engage with those artisanal miners, working directly with people on the ground to make transparent, traceable supply chains. It’s very genuine. It’s not greenwashing.”

Other options include Nothing, a UK-based company that makes stylish, semi-transparent handsets. France’s Crosscall has a good line of sustainable, tough, waterproof phones that are used by French police and national railways. Then there is Murena, which is also from France. Most of its phones rely on the Google Android operating system, but they can be fully “de-Googled” with the /e/OS operating system that comes standard with the phones. The OS was developed by the global nonprofit e Foundation, which is based primarily in Europe.

Shopping

Amazon has such a hammerlock on online purchasing, finding an alternative is a challenge. The only real option is to shop around. “Our general rule for buying online is to buy refurbished or secondhand where possible,” says Fraser. “And there are really good markets for that.” Backmarket is recommended for digital devices, “because it’s French owned, everything’s refurbished up to a good standard, and you have consumer protection.”

For secondhand books, Oxfam in the UK is always a good place to start. For new books, Bookshop.org gives a cut of its profits to independent bookshops. For new products, look for eco-oriented stores such as Veo and Shared Earth, or cooperatively-run retailers that share profits and pay their taxes. Amazon is reported to have avoided £575m in tax revenue in the UK in 2024.

Social Media

“This is where things get tricky, Rose says. “Not because there aren’t perfectly good alternatives to big platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X, but because you need a critical mass to make a social media platform work. So despite their catalog of harms, ills, misinformation and horrendous deepfake porn creation tools, these US giants continue to dominate.”

“But only because we let them. The steady exodus from Elon Musk’s X has benefited smaller, independent alternatives such as US-owned Bluesky and German-developed Mastodon, whose feeds boast considerably less hate, misinformation, bot-generated content and AI slop, and whose followings are appreciable (about 1.5 million and 800,000 monthly active users, respectively), though dwarfed by the likes of Facebook (3 billion) and Instagram (2 billion).”

“A promising new contender is W, a 100% European platform (but nothing to do with the EU, as conspiracy theorists have claimed). “We believe there is an urgent need for a new social media platform built, governed and hosted in Europe. With human verification, free speech and data privacy at its core,” said W’s chief executive Anna Zeiter on (Microsoft-owned) LinkedIn. It launches in March.”

Principles Vs. Convenience

Internet controversy is like the weather. Everyone talks about it, but few people go much beyond that. The offerings from Microsoft, Google, Apple, and other tech giants are free — who doesn’t like free? And they are engineered to take over our digital lives seamlessly while calling little attention to their dangers. They are like the wind and the tide — there, but largely ignored. It is just so damned easy to dive into their products. Why wouldn’t you?

The reason not to, of course, is to retain some separation between the digital world and your private life (and that of your children). If that costs you a little bit of money, is it not worth the expense nonetheless?

I have committed to experimenting with an alternative search engine, browser, and email system and will share my experience with our readers. Those who have experience with these other options are encouraged to share your experiences with us and with the rest of the CleanTechnica community.

Digital citizens of the world, unite to throw off the chains we have been saddled with by Big Tech. It’s possible but not easy. Will it succeed? Tell us why or why not.