Imagine there is no YT, no Twitter/X, no Facebook, no Netflix, no Amazon, no Apple, no Google to to search the Web, no chatGPT. Imagine there is no TikTok either (even though it’s not US). Just imagine there is no ‘giant’ tech from anywhere owning any app or service that millions if not billions of people are willing to use.
A world without any of those giant (US) tech companies and services that many of us take for granted.
In that world, what would you use the Internet for? How would you use it? And how much time do you think you would spend online, compared to now?
(my own answer in the comments)
Funny, but for me very little would change. The only one of those I use even occasionally is YT, and the videos would start appearing elsewhere. Peertube, maybe?
EDIT: Oh, I’d lose my steam library. That would be a nuisance!
You’d lose most of everything. If you think AWS and cloudflare and such arent U.S. owned, ignoring Microsoft, we are missing most of it.
Edit: your domain you are posting this on is cloudflare I believe, so U.S.
I self-host my own shit including game servers, so I would read lemmy while playing Terraria or AssaultCube.
So pretty much no change.
OP only listed consumer services, not the infrastructure side. I completely agree with you that if we would take that part into consideration then … Not a lot in the beginning. And in the end because the whole financial sector is also dependent on various US companies and their online services to process most payments … Shit. I don’t know which other critical infrastructures would break because stuff behind the curtain disappeared.
–
That said if it’s really only “what I as consumer use” then things would look different - even though it all comes down to the details. I.e. no smartphone would be a nuisance … unless Linux phones count.
You know the internet was around before AWS and Cloudflare? People could go back to hosting their own websites on their own hardware. Sites would take longer to load without the cdns.
Yeah, I am currently using a PieFed instance that is behind Cloudfare, because my regular instance has problems. But I have preferred instances not behind Cloudfare.
AWS, it’s not really legal for any public institutions in EU to use AWS. Many do anyway, though. So yeah, some stuff might break in the society. But not that many things I use personally. Hopefully they have backups of their code on their own servers as well, so that if AWS ever disappears, they can quickly run the same code on some sensible platform. Wonder where their databases are physically located, though :D