Moving away from Big Tech?
At the start of this year, the Netherlands Court of Audit (NL: Rekenkamer) published a report about the ‘Dutch central government in the cloud’. The Court acknowledges that leveraging cloud services can increase efficiency and improve service delivery. At the same time, it states that the government has limited insight into the cloud and didn’t make necessary risk assessments of most cloud services it is using, potentially leaving citizens and businesses exposed to too much risk. This could disrupt society. Since this report, our parliament has pressured the government to define a policy that will make us less dependent on the cloud and US Big Tech.
Please note: This report came out a few days before a new president, highly sponsored by US Big Tech firms, started his term in office, kicking off a trade war and trying to establish a pre-globalisation world order. Our institutions are definitely ahead of the curve here!
Big Tech is everywhere
In all the projects I’m currently involved in, it is abundantly clear how pervasive Big Tech is in our daily lives. We run their software on devices they make and use their services from their cloud running in their data centres. The connectivity and the content are still ours, although you may have doubts about the content if you use AI and read the fine print in the terms & conditions. So, what can we do?
Buy local: EU first
If the current trade war teaches us anything, there are local alternatives for many goods and services. In all fairness, the ICT sector is not the best example of this. We struggle to find the scale and quality in Europe that we have grown used to in the recent past. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. There are local and regional hosting providers, and many use the current geopolitical situation to emphasise that they can host your data locally in the EU. While a choice to go local decreases dependencies, it also makes your data subject to local legislation, and to me, that is a good thing. The Data Privacy Act (GDPR), the Data Governance Act, and the Data Act put the rights of citizens and consumers at the forefront.
Open-source as a feasible alternative
There is an open-source alternative for almost all the functionality I use daily. I’m writing this post in WordPress on a laptop running Ubuntu Linux. I just migrated all my OneNote notebooks to Joplin, which I replicate to a Nextcloud instance with my local Dutch Internet Hosting Provider. And who needs WhatsApp if there is Signal? The next part of the Away-from-Big-Tech project is running Jitsi on my private (Next)cloud.
When it works, it works great. The user interface is slightly different, but once you get into it, you find all kinds of features and gems that are totally worth the effort of migrating. For instance, the Markdown language in Joplin is not entirely intuitive, but it provides way more control than I ever had in OneNote. Seamless integration or every form of integration is a bit of a struggle, though. At this point, it is not for everyone to take the road to open-source software. However, it is doable with the help of open-source communities and the information on product forums. But you have to be a bit of a nerd to enjoy the ride, which I do, so I probably am.
