Breaking Free of the Dominance

Computer software is tied up on the USA and its large corporations, but is it possible to break free?

Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

During a number of years, there have been several initiatives across the European Union to develop alternatives to the American software and services that dominate the use of computers – which means, dominates almost everything we do.

Almost every single company, organization, or individual in Europa, like in the rest of the world, is dependent on the USA big tech companies: through the computer operating system, Windows, or though mobile phones – or several apps and cloud services that we cannot live and function without anymore.

It should be possible to skip Microsoft Office, as there are alternatives on the market, such as LibreOffice (which is open-source, community based, originally developed in Europe, but, actually, also effectively from the USA¹). However, most users will then run it on Windows or macOS, which both are American operating systems.

There is, of course, Linux. For a number of good and bad reasons, it never really hit it for individual users, even though a large part of the Internet servers and devices are using Linux as their operating system. Linux is open-source and not specifically American, even though it is interesting to see how Microsoft has been trying to get an ownership of that world as well, like they once tried to make their own alternative to the Internet (called MSN, Microsoft Network). Microsoft’s approaches have been many, but one was to buy GitHub, where much of the open-source development takes place. GitHub is a kind of mix between a social media and community, and a source code repository. GitHub uses Git, a repository management software developed specially for the development of Linux, even though GitHub doesn’t own Git, and Git can be used without GitHub. It just leans heavily on the open-source movement, in name and function.

Almost every programmer uses GitHub, and the system is free to use for open-source projects, making Microsoft a significant player in that market. Also, Microsoft has launched many open-source projects themselves, and put parts of their existing code into the open source².

Microsoft has also embedded many open-source products into their own products and services, this way making use of the free development to build bigger systems of services than they would otherwise be able to, and, at the same time, claim that they support the open-source community.

Many other products than Microsoft Office exist as open-source versions or alternatives, and you could, if you really wanted, put together a fully operating platform for a company that didn’t include any commercial software. But the IT departments are being targeted by Microsoft’s marketing and nursing to skip the alternatives and use Microsoft’s software instead, and it works! You can find many IT managers and employees who will tell you, proudly, that “we are a Microsoft house”.

Now, the IT world isn’t revolving around Microsoft alone. Several other companies take part, and they are almost all American.

A very important, and dangerous, development has taken place over some years: the cloud revolution. It is about not doing all the computing on your own computers, back in your own offices, but instead using computers that you have rented from someone on the Internet. For instance, Microsoft, Amazon, or Google. You may rent the computers completely, using all ends of them yourself, or you may rent some “computing resources”, which will then be provided by the vendors out of their pool of computers.

This is how almost everything is done today. Very few companies, and, indeed, very few individuals, would be able to get through a day if the access to these cloud services would disappear.

Cloud services are not just such things that IT managers care about. Substack, for instance, is run as a cloud service. If the company Substack would lose the access to this, there would be no Substack. If you, as a Substack user, would lose your access, then, of course, you couldn’t use Substack either. And virtually all social media systems and most software products are today entangled in cloud services, even if there is a locally installed part of it. You often need to at least log in to a cloud service in order to use your locally installed software, and often, there will be an ongoing communication between the local software and the cloud software.

Mobile phones are not individual devices anymore, only connected to a telephone central, as they were before the smartphone idea took over. They are effectively computer terminals that use cloud services.

It should be clear, that if any of all this stops working – perhaps just for some people, or the people in a country, or a continent – there would be serious problems getting through a working day, or even the day of an individual person.

Very much rely on the functionality of software and services: payments, communication, sales, subscriptions and information, help and assistance (911, for instance), electricity and other supplies and facilities, defense, security and surveillance, and many of the mechanical devices, we wouldn’t even suspect to have a connection anywhere, such as modern cars or heating systems.

If the ones controlling such software and services would decide to switch these off, the world as we know it would, literally, be switched off.

That is why Europeans are getting worried.

Almost all software and services are controlled by American companies, directly under the influence of the American government, while much of the hardware, the software runs on, is made by and often controlled by Chinese companies.

It is very easy to switch off Europe.

With changing political trends in the USA, it actually has happened already, that otherwise trusted services became unavailable to individuals or organizations, even though the lawyers of the big tech companies do their best to deny it. For instance, Karim Khan, a prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, lost access to his emails after order by Donald Trump, because of the arrest order on Benjamin Netanyahu, which isn’t accepted by the USA. Microsoft claims that they didn’t block the emails, but that remains an open question as the emails apparently were blocked, so someone did it. A view on this at Politico: https://www.politico.eu/article/microsoft-did-not-cut-services-international-criminal-court-president-american-sanctions-trump-tech-icc-amazon-google/

Whatever has happened or not, the very possibility for such things to happen are making people think: “we can’t make ourselves that dependent on other people’s good will”.

And it means that, for instance, Denmark is now examining how the dependency on these American services can be reduced, at a government level. Companies are not there yet, as the IT managers still see great advantages for themselves and their departments by using the American software, but public administration has from time to time thrown out Microsoft and run with Linux, often going back some years later, when a new political team was elected.

My guess is that we are looking at a pile of explosives here, that will blow up as soon as a spark ignites it. The slightest sign that the USA and its big tech dominating companies will abuse their position in the world to damage European countries, and we will see a massive move away from the American products and services.

Until then, there will be initiatives now and then, isolated to individual city administrations or national government offices, but nobody will dare to be a front-runner and throw it out completely – until it suddenly will happen, as a result of a bad move by the USA.

At that time, it will not even be a matter of doing it without too much trouble, or without losing functionality or even data. It will be something that will be done, even if it means several steps back, from where we will then have to redo the development of similar products and services.

It will be ugly, as we have got ourselves into deep water with the digitalization process that has been running for several years now, where almost everything is in the cloud, using American software and services. But it will happen, unless things start moving into a better direction in the USA.

1. The open-source world is using a mix of software and libraries that often belong to one or another organization, including some based in the USA.

2. Why would a commercial company put their code into the open source? Well, it is not as altruistic as it may sound: perhaps 90% of the code becomes open-source, while the rest remains proprietary. That makes it difficult for a competitor to take the open-source code and make an exact copy of the commercial product, so, the company still preserves the control of the product. But they get access to all the world’s programmers and their free workforce for the further development of the product.