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)
I feel like Zuckerfuck made this post for ideas on how to circumvent competition.
Lemmy. Peertube. Matrix. Codeburg. Mistral if i cant reach local AI.
Only real lack i have access to movies and shows, and losing steam for new downloads. So that time would have to be spent elsewhere
Of course too, how much of these services would be wiped out with out big tech for auth (sign in fron google, etc) and big tech from cloud services (AWS, Cloudflare, GCP, etc).
Like I did 25 years ago. We’d all use more different websites and that would be it. I’ll gladly take these giant corpos for granted because if they disappeared, the market would not disappear with them. There would be others which would replace them and in the beginning, they would all be small companies or community driven efforts. A glory to behold.
What do you really think there corporations can offer that can’t be replaced by anyone else? Shit, google in the 90’s was two guys in a garage and ebay was someone’s old computer used as a server and it worked. It can all be replaced.
This question looks odd on the fediverse. It seems to assume there’s no european alternatives to the sites mentioned here, which for most of them isn’t true. Or that there are only giant tech alternatives.
You do realized piefed.social isn’t giant tech, right?
I think with a world without access to US apps and online services, the biggest loss to humanity would be Wikipedia. If we narrow it to just giant tech, I think it’s easily doable. It would be a shame to lose the wealth of content on Youtube, but it’s something we can manage with.
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?
About the same as now? I mean, again, hobbyist social media exists, it’s not just giant tech. We’re literally using it. In such a hypothetical world, stuff like the fediverse would be much more popular.
This question looks odd on the fediverse. It seems to assume there’s no european alternatives to the sites mentioned here,
I see your point but no, not really. I only listed the few most obvious example of big tech I could think of, as a trigger.
You do realized piefed.social isn’t giant tech, right?
I do. and that is a neat example of why it matters to keep things in perspective: how many of us is there compared to gigantic Reddit? So, when I was mentioning those few big tech I only mentioned what most people do use, it implied nothing on what alternative may be available.
As a matter of fact their existence is the very reason why I decided to ask the question: wanting to see how people were using the Web and if/how they would need to change that usage without access to US-tech. Reading the many answers, a lot of seem to be fine without US tech but, obviously, we’re also aposting that on Lemmy which make most of us already biased against big tech ;)
I’m very happy suddenly. I would spend exactly the same amount of time online and do exactly the same things
yeah, you’re describing China. it fucking sucks ass if I’m honest
you can “just use VPN lol” but you might be surprised how difficult it is to use a lot of websites with a VPN IP address block. and people around you will generally not be using any of these websites, so the social networks are kind of useless. you basically live on The China App
🎵The internet is for porn.🎶
Imagine there is no…
YT - dont use it. Don’t like video tutorials, I prefer to read them, don’t like adverts or propaganda!
no Twitter/X, no Facebook - not used them I over ten years
no Netflix, no Amazon - stopped using a few years ago
no Apple - never used
no Google to to search the Web - plenty of other search engines
no chatGPT - soon won’t be there for anyone!
I get my apps from F-droid, I read my web comics on websites, I send emails, I chat with my friends.
Does steam go in your scenario? In that case I imagine GoG will take over there!
You know, the only reason these companies have so much power over your government and so much of your money is they’ve tricked you that you’re missing out without them. 💁♂️
You know, the only reason these companies have so much power over your government and so much of your money is they’ve tricked you that you’re missing out without them. 💁♂️
I don’t know if you’re speaking to me specifically here but I would like to point out an issue I see in your comment (as well as in a few others, yours being an excellent demonstration) that I think is at least as important as that supposed gullibility you seem to think is mine/ours in regard to big tech. I’m talking about this habit too many of us share in thinking and maybe I should say ‘in believing’ which seems more appropriate to this type of behavior, that we know (what’s going on, what to do) better than the others around us, while those others are being wrong and they are doing it wrong.
That ‘you’ (are wrong) you insist so much on, vs an implied ‘me’ (I know what I do), doesn’t help much pleading your argument. I thought you might to know that.
Also, note that you have no idea at all regarding my stance in regards to those big tech, nor how I chose to spend my money—like I have zero idea regarding the you do it, but I don’t suppose anything either.
Finally, the reasons you listed are correct, at least partly are (sure, our willingness to use them is an important factor), but they’re also far from being the ‘the only reasons’ things are the way they are in regards to US big tech, and why they have gained so much power. It would too long to list but allow me to share some quick hints:
- DMCA and all its many variations is making sure that no other country will ever be able to… ‘reverse engineer’ US tech (no matter if US tech itself does it since its very inception), giving them a serious edge no matter what potentially better (and non-US) product could come out of liberating apps and services from that anti-copying mechanism. (that is certainly not my fault, nor is it yours, if most countries around the world have bowed in front of that absurd systems, and you can be assured that none of them has done it on their own free will… US economical power of coercion is as real and probably even more efficient as its armed forces (ask Iran and Venezuela, while we wait to see who’s next to get a taste of US freedom)
- It is not by sheer willingness to give away free money that US lobbyists do spend billions trying to force things to go the direction they want them to go, in the USA and around the world too. (what the US lobbyist chose to spend its fortune on that is certainly not my fault, nor is it yours, not anymore than people being receptive to corruption or being unable to realize what is at stake is not our fault, right?)
- That is also not a coincidence if the latest US administration is plaguing the EU with tariffs (and with insults, and now with threats). It wants the EU to cave in and, among a few other things (like, say, our money), they want the EU to get rid of all those ‘mean’ rules we created to rein-in their precious ‘US big tech’ while protecting the data of our citizens. (seeing how clueless and coward most our EU leaders are, I have little doubt the EU will cave-in but that is certainly not my fault, nor is it yours)
We could go on discussing the many other ‘reasons’ that make things the way they are but I think it’s enough, at least I hope so, to show you we can and should focus on much more than blaming our own lazy asses, that is if we want for things to really change, and that we could and should do it without trying to put our own little precious person on a pedestal while telling the rest of the world they’re all being stupid morons.
My 2 cents.
Agree for all except YT. It is unfortunately VERY VERY useful. You seem to have found a workaround that works for you though
The same way we did it before those things existed or had taken over. Believe it or not, the internet used to be that way 👴
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
I don’t need to imagine, I lived in those days and still remember them.
Connecting daily to an FTP to see if there’s anything new to download.
Jumping into mIRC to chat with random strangers and even online dating.
Finding out about cool websites from PC magazines and then visiting them.
Discussing anything in the good old forums.
It’s also not as if there wouldn’t be search and alternative hosting services, which all existed to varying degrees outside of US control.
I used up so much of my youth on mIRC. I was even on a server that had a make shift 1 pn 1 yugioh online battling platform that I believe also ran through irc. Those were the days.
Yes, this is the best answer.
porn? no change, furry porn sites aren’t run by big tech
gaming? very little change as all I seem to be interested in lately is Space Station 14 and that’s open source with a standalone launcher that doesn’t require Steam
social media? nearly all of that for me is just mastodon and lemmy.
youtube videos going away would suck for the lost knowledge and art and discussion, tho if it meant google died that’s a price I’m willing to pay
Most of those US services (YouTube, Twitter, etc.) arose to fill a niche which was opened by expanding access and bandwidth. Take YouTube as an example, the idea of sharing a video on a dial-up connection was simply silly. Just downloading the contents of a 1.44MB floppy on a 14.4kbps modem took forever. Even when we got to a 56kbps modem, pictures could still be slow and GIFs were painful to download. It wasn’t until home DSL or cable connections became common that sharing a video was even close to reasonable. In that environment, we saw the start of media sharing services rushing to fill a previously unknown “need”. The most well known was Napster for music sharing, but we also saw the start of bittorrent clients. While not exactly legal, early music sharing and torrent sites showed that people wanted to be able to download media. And with sites like MySpace or GeoCities cropping up, it was apparent that people wanted to also create and share media. YouTube simply married up those two desires at a time where the technology could reasonably support it. And they have massively capitalized on the first mover advantage. With them also having Google money to scale the service, they now sit in a fairly privileged position in their niche.
I bring this up to say that, were US based services snapped out of existence, new services would arise to fill the gap. If you look at somewhere like China, where access to US services is highly regulated, they aren’t simply doing without, they are creating their own alternatives. TikTok is a good example, while it lacks the longer form videos of YouTube, it did provide media sharing in China. Were YouTube to be blocked at the Great Firewall, TikTok is in a good position to expand into the longer form videos. China also already has WeChat which fills much of the Twitter and FaceBook nice. Russia has VKontakte for those spaces as well. Basically, any place which isn’t well served by US based media giants has their own solutions to fill those gaps.
Western Europe (using EU as shorthand, though yes I know the EU isn’t all of Western Europe) has the issue of being closely linked with the US economically and culturally. US based services can operate in most EU countries with little friction. Sure, they have to figure out GDPR and Data Privacy issues, but that’s not a major barrier, despite US companies’ whining. So, given the size, first mover advantage and money behind the US based solutions, there hasn’t been space for reasonable EU based replacements. Why use some second rate EU based system, when the US system works so well, and the EU and US are such good allies and closely linked?
Of course, that last bit is changing (which is part of why you’re asking the question, no doubt). With the US Government going quickly off the rails, and US tech giants doing their damnedest to enshitify everything, the deep cultural links between the US and EU are starting to slip. There might now be space for EU based services to try to step in and replace services like YouTube or Twitter. And that’s the answer to your question. If those services go away, they will be replaced by something else. In time, they are probably bound to be replaced anyway. At one time everyone though MySpace was here to stay, these days I suspect some folks had to google it to figure out what the hell I was going on about. It may be a long time to come, but I’d bet on YouTube eventually being replaced. I have no idea what will replace it, but nothing lasts forever.
Of course, that last bit is changing (which is part of why you’re asking the question, no doubt).
maybe? :)
And that’s the answer to your question. If those services go away, they will be replaced by something else.
I would be tempted to agree (while also recognizing a minority (like myself) would try to steer away from anything remotely looking like a clone of those ‘original models’ and rekindle the interest for a smaller more fragmented Web) but, at the same time, suffice to see how that less-democratic USA we now have to live with is dealing with anything that even remotely looks like a threat: invading a country, taxing it do death (unless they withdraw any law deemed unfair for US businesses),… I doubt those USA would allow any serious alternative to grow and to reach a large enough audience… But then, in my first hypothesis and for some mysterious reason we would already have lost access to US tech/services, and therefore one may conclude that at the same time USA would have lost access to us as a potential market and wouldn’t have any leverage against our own attempts, well, maybe? ;)
but nothing lasts forever.
Not even empires, or wannabe new empires. But isn’t it what history is all about: failed dreams of grandeur?
edit: typos.
and rekindle the interest for a smaller more fragmented Web
Why wait? https://indieweb.org/
Thx for the link, I will check that and see if my own tiny, silly blog can fit anywhere with them.
Just FYI when switching to light mode the layout on your website breaks (doesn’t have a max-width any more)
How do you switch mode on my blog? I mean, it’s static and, to the best of my limited understanding, I’ve removed anything in the theme that remotely looked like a script… so I’m surprised you can toggle its theme. Is there a toggle I’ve missed somewhere? (Also, maybe we could discuss that through MP to avoid making useless noise in the thread ;))
Your blog follows the system theme.
Sounds like paradise, can we make the US this way please?
I still use RSS quite a lot, both for articles and for podcasts.
