this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2025
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I think the world would be a better place if we collectively perma-banned all American digital services (while helping NGOs/open source projects relocate their infrastructure and legal organisations out of the US).
There would be a lot more competition, a wider variety of product offerings, more regional customisation, a bigger focus on long tail services.
It would be messy at first, but that's the nature of a transition from an oligarch model to a competitive model.
While what I am saying may sound like a pipe dream or pettyness, but from my perspective everything starts from a small step.
And if you don't live in the US (but are unfortunately impacted by their internal politics), you do have to take a more sober attitude towards their claimed commitment to democracy, free markets and rule of law.
Yes, in the new "might is right" world Trump is pushing for, it's better to start pushing back or get pushed over. In his "make a deal" world view, better to say to ban everything outright in two weeks. In his typical fashion, some compromises might appears the next day. Losing a few hundred million customers and large amounts of influence will sting him and his supporters.
I would argue the goal should be actually permanently getting rid of American technology services as opposed to getting a deal.
By this point American business leaders (not only in tech) have decisively proven that they are not any better than say russian oligarchs; a group of corrupt criminals who will happily support authoritarianism as long as they get to keep their businesses interests.
Plus allowing another countries tech to be embedded into government and services, military, and any other critical operations is an omnipresent national security risk. Doesn't matter if they're an ally.
Democracies should be run on 100% open source. The developed world could collectively employ less engineers than big tech and I am certain they could produce a better ecosystem of services, both through contributions to existing projects as well as greenfield, that would also provide wide reaching benefits to every other economy... and they could do it cheaper than big tech. It's easy to beat private companies that must enshittify to achieve constant profit growth.
Ugh. So bored reading all these words without any mention of raping the populace for profits.