The politics

Europe has a deep technical dependency issue with the United States. This has been so for decades, but only recently it has become a very visibly concerning risk. I will not dive very deep into the politics, except to state that at this point in time, we cannot trust American tech to run our personal lives, our companies and our governments.

We must work under four assumptions that combined become very troubling. The first, the most obvious one, is that American tech companies ultimately operate within the jurisdiction of the United States of America, pretty much like Chinese companies ultimately are subject to the powers of Chinese Communist Party. The second assumption, is that the leader of the American executive power has excessive leverage over the majority party in both chambers of Congress. In other words, the legislative branch has become very weakened, which also means weakened checks and balances over the executive’s power. The third assumption is that American big tech has become heavily interdependent with the American presidency. This was painfully put on display during the president’s inauguration this January. Some examples of the actions of members of the American oligarchs have been worse than the symbolism of the inauguration, like DOGE hollowing the US government from the inside and the owner of the Washington Post shutting off the light that that publication used to shine on democracy. The fourth and the most speculative assumption, yet at the same time the most alarming one, is that America has effectively sided with Russia. It should be needless to remind that Russia invaded a European country and has been waging non-kinetic warfare against Europe as a whole, as exemplified by the acts of sabotage to our undersea cables. Compounding all of this, is America’s newfound love for trade wars and the leverage that their tech gives them.

Combining the four assumptions, while we cannot definitely state that American technology has become compromised, we must work under the assumption that it has. So, what do we do now? We need to de-risk our personal lives, our companies and our governments from American tech in all places that we can. There are three layers to this. The first is to replace American tech with European tech, or with tech from countries that still think like us, like Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Canada and South Korea. Whenever the only options come from the United States, the second layer is to pick open source software alternatives. While open source software can also be compromised, at least it can’t be used as strategic leverage. The final and third layer, when all other options are exhausted, is to pick the least evil American option, knowing however, that it is still a strategic risk to do so. At the moment that I am writing this, the big American companies that seem the least evil to me are IBM and Microsoft.

I will not go through all the options that we have, but I will share the steps that I made to de-risk my small company and my personal life from US tech as much as I could. I will share the rationale for my choices, but please beware that each person, each family, company and even each government have different needs, so their choices would very naturally be very different. To get a very complete list of options, here’s a great place to go: https://european-alternatives.eu/. During this process I found out that European tech is far richer than what most expect.

Let’s get started.

European Alternatives

Email and Office

I considered several options, but I need to be able to do everything from a browser, which includes emails, calendar, word processing, spreadsheets and even presentations. Basically, I needed a Google Workspace alternative. Because of this I picked Infomaniak, which is developed by a Swiss company. I created two separate kSuite Pro subscriptions, one for my personal affairs, represented by my personal email address and another one for my company. Their email and calendar services work really well and their document editors are based on OnlyOffice, which is a European alternative to Microsoft Office. The latter isn’t perfect, but it works really well and is completely fit for purpose. For users with less professional needs, Infomaniak also has my kSuite, which is a very direct alternative to Google Mail and Outlook.com for personal accounts. It also includes document editing, spreadsheets and so on. Here’s a very easy decision criteria to help chose between kSuite Pro and my KSuite. If you have your own domain, something like my-address@my-own-domain.com, go for kSuite Pro. If you want to move from my-address@gmail.com to a new service, but don’t want to buy and manage your domain, my kSuite has a few email domains to chose from, like my-address@ik.me, my-address@etik.com or my-address@ikmail.com. Either way you go, you have free options.

A very interesting feature from Infomaniak is that you can mix and match several subscriptions for different needs, all behind a single user login.

Other options that I also considered and really enjoyed were Proton Mail and Tuta.

Password Manager

This is a no-brainer. I moved away from Bitwarden to Proton Pass.

Two-Factor Authentication

My previous option was Google Authenticator. Now it is Aegis Authenticator, an open source project.

Internet browser

My daily machine is a Chromebook, which I absolutely love, but which I will not replace with another one in the future. This means that I am stuck with Chrome for now. On my other machines, and on my future daily machine, I valued more choosing European than open source, which meant picking Vivaldi.

Search Engine

For now, I am using StartPage, which is a Dutch search engine. Sadly it uses Google as the underlying engine. The upside is that the quality of the search results is excellent.

Music Streaming

Here the concern isn’t so much online safety, but more focused on the trade conflict, and a little of it is out of solidarity towards Canada. I cancelled Tidal and subscribed SoundCloud Go+.

Video Streaming

I cancelled Disney+ and subscribed Filmin.

Social Media

Just leave Twitter/X and Facebook and replace them with your real-life friends. Now, more seriously if you need a substitute, Mastodon is an open alternative, and it is the creation of a German engineer.

Chat

For communications, right now I am trying to shift as many people to Signal away from WhatsApp as possible. Sadly it is American. Happily it is managed by a non-Profit organization and most importantly, Signal is open source.

The following sections will trend increasingly towards the technical side.

Cloud Hosting and DNS

I have quickly shifted gears for my upcoming projects and I will be using Scaleway and Bunny CDN, which are both European companies. For DNS, it is OVH. They have a ton of other services, but it is my policy that my DNS provider is used exclusively for DNS.

Operating System

My OS of choice is now openSuse Linux Leap. This is a German distribution of the Linux operating system. I absolutely love Debian, but having the root of the maintenance in Europe supersedes everything else.

Because all my other preferences would be some Linux distribution and because there is no reason to pick other distributions than openSuse, that is really the way forward for me. With Linux, unlike all other operating systems, you can pick your desktop. For Mac users or users who prefer a very clean environment, I would recommend Gnome. For Windows users or users who prefer a ton of customization options, I would recommend KDE.

I would assume that the most daunting aspect of using Linux would be to get it installed. If that is something that scares you, the simplest way is to chose your next computer with Linux already installed. Read on.

Computer

I haven’t yet replaced my Chromebook, but I am considering only two options. One of them is Slimbook. The other is Tuxedo Computers. These computers are as European tech as it gets, but sadly, there is one point of dependency which we still can’t get rid of, the CPU. They all come with either Intel or AMD chips, which in either case are Intel architecture (x86/x64). We are waiting for Tuxedo to launch their first ARM computer. While the maker of the chip will be Qualcomm, the architecture will be the intellectual property of ARM, which is historically a British company, but is now owned by a Japanese bank and publicly listed in NASDAQ. Still, it is somewhat of a minor improvement over Intel architecture in terms of dependency of US tech. I see this as our most serious risk in the sense that we have no complete viable alternative to US chips at this point in time. Europe needs to make a huge bet in bringing RISC-V chips into our generalist computing environments.

Source Code Hosting

I am huge fan of GitLab, and it is culturally very European, but sadly it is incorporated in the US, which still makes it a risk. For that reason I have shifted most of my repositories to BitBucket, which is maintained by Atlassian, an Australian company and Australia is still a member of the liberal world.