The entire world has been subject to American technological power for decades. Their companies and services have become the de facto standard in the industry, but in recent months the panorama has changed. Countries around the world are realizing that their interests and those of those companies are not always aligned. Structural change now seems inevitable, and that means one thing: abandoning US technology. Or rather, try.
The UpScrolled case. In just one week the Australian platform UpScrolled has surpassed the million users. The growth has occurred after the unknowns posed by the new situation of TikTok, which will now operate in the US as part of a consortium led by Oracle. This sudden success, although modest, shows that there is a market looking for alternatives, they detail. in Rest of World.
I want to have my data secure. Last year Donald Trump signed an executive order. It sanctioned the International Criminal Court and its main person in charge, British lawyer Karim Khan, for having issued an arrest warrant against Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli Prime Minister. Everything indicates that Microsoft canceled the email account Khan, and he reacted by migrating his account to the Swiss provider Proton Mail, which has more than 100 million users around the world. If Microsoft can “silence” a senior international official, governments take note.
France leads the charge. In the European Union, the French government has prohibited its public officials the use of American technological solutions. The measure seeks to protect the integrity of its communications, and the French country is promoting local options like TomTom or Here for navigation and Visio for video calls. The EU wants to support these solutions through the DMA, but here the objective is not only economic, but strategic. Relying too much on Silicon Valley is proving to be dangerous.
Made in India. 6,500 km away from Paris, in New Delhi, Indian leaders are moving in that same direction. They are actively supporting the use of the Zoho office suite as an alternative to Google Docs, and they also have their own messaging platform, Arattaiwhich competes with WhatsApp. In reality, India has been promoting your digital sovereigntyand it is not the only one on the Asian continent. In Japan we have examples like Line and in South Korea KakaoTalk triumphs, they are already absolute leaders and areas that the American Big Tech have not managed to reconquer.
Powerful knight is a gift of money. Although local alternatives exist, there is a first major obstacle: financing. Most technology startups depend significantly on venture capital, and here Silicon Valley investment companies dominate the landscape. If governments want real technological sovereignty, they must promote those investment ecosystems that also compete with North American firms.
AI as a loophole. There is an option to get around those obstacles: the availability of open weight AI models like those offered by China. These LLMs are capable of helping to develop their own software ecosystems that compete or at least are valid alternatives for the governments that take advantage of them. AI is another battlefield in which the US is investing in a big way, yes, but those open models that especially come from China are an avenue to explore.
Regional superapps. We are also seeing how there are local platforms that manage to compete with those that the US has managed to turn into true empires. In Southeast Asia there are cases such as Grab (Singapore) and Gojek (Indonesia) that have driven out of business or largely displaced the almighty Uber. They have done it by creating their own map systems and payments, but above all they have achieved this by understanding the needs of their markets better than foreign competitors. The Canadian journalist Paris Marx, usually critical of Silicon Valley, made a good review of European alternatives to various US technological platforms.
The real challenge: comfort. Although alternatives exist and in some cases are very relevant, all of them require extra work that most people are not willing to do. Resistance to change plays a leading role here, and the reality is that users are usually comfortable with the products and services they already use. Geopolitical arguments that are persuasive at the government level may not be as persuasive among end users.
Infrastructure? And then there’s the other problem: these services and platforms are still almost absolutely cloud-centric, and for something to work in the cloud you need data centers that support such operations. Europe, Asia and the entire world have celebrated time and again when Microsoft, Amazon or Google installed a data center in their countries, but what they probably did not realize is that these data centers were, in some way, poisoned. Now it is much more difficult to react, and avoiding that dependency will take years and a lot of money… if that ever happens.
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