Hitting the tech billionaires where it hurts
Another interesting couple of stories from the FT, on the debate in Europe about taxing US tech companies.
European Commission president Ursula von der Leye pointed out that, if you want to hit Trump's billionaire backers where it hurts, a simple approach would be to slap taxes on Facebook, Google, et al. Specifically on their ad products.
But the German finance minister, Jörg Kukies opposes that approach, pointing out that EU citizens rely on those same companies for huge parts of their professional and person lives...
“We simply have to be cautious with digital corporations because we have no real alternatives to the offering by the American digital industry,” said German finance minister Jörg Kukies, mentioning data centres for cloud services and artificial intelligence. “There are products where the ability to substitute from other services and other goods from other regions of the world is easy, and there are sectors where it is more difficult,” he said.
That line about there being no viable EU substitutes is an interesting one. Certainly that was true a couple of decades ago. In 2009, when I wrote for the Guardian, I got in quite a lot of trouble with my British friends for criticizing the UK tech industry vs that of the US. Specifically the fact that, apart from Spotify, there were almost no British or EU-native rivals to the American tech giants.
Today things look very different. A couple of weeks ago, partly as an experiment and partly in protest against American tech assholes, I tried to see which of the American apps on my phone could easily be replaced with an EU or Canadian rival.
Frankly, I was surprised by how many already had been: I already used Deezer (French) for music streaming, Hue (Dutch) to control my home lights, and Ecobee (originally Canadian, but now US owned annoyingly) as a thermostat. I wear a Withings (French) smartwatch which is BEAUTIFUL...
...and plays perfectly with my Withings smart scale and sleep tracker. It's been a long time since I shopped on Amazon because (LIKE YOU!) I now only shop local, except for my regular shipments of British chocolate and Branston Pickle from British Corner Shop.
I hate AI but recently played around with Mistral's Le Chat ("the cat" - really) and found it to be at least equal if not better to ChatGPT. And far less creepy. Meantime, DeepL (German) knocks Google translate into a cocked hat.
Speaking of Google, a far better alternative is Ecosia (German) which has no invasive tracking and funnels all of its profits back into planting trees.
For email, you're frankly insane if you're not already using an encrypted service, of which Protonmail (Swiss) is widely considered the best. Proton also has a great password manager, VPN, and file storage platform - although on the latter thing, I prefer Tresorit (also Swiss.)
Having already cancelled my subscriptions to the LA Times and Washington Post (and remaining constantly furious at the NY Times) I now get almost all of my news from the BBC (Radio and online), the Guardian, and the FT - the latter of which I have delivered here in the desert. The best TV is all on Britbox.
Really the only US apps I'm stuck with are for banking/investing and domestic-specific tools like airline ticket apps. Not much I can do there, except learn to love writing checks and printing plane tickets at home, I guess.
Then there's the irritating fact that iOS and Android are the only games in town for the actual phone itself, and MacOS and Windows for desktop computing. I tried a couple of Android alternatives like Graphene but, honestly, the tradeoffs were too great, especially as Graphine only runs on Google's Pixel hardware. Linux is all fine and dandy (Linux Mint was developed by a Frenchman) but, again, hardly a painless swap. (This is the consumer equivalent of Kukies' point about American data centers)
Overall, though, if the EU's Ursula von der Leye gets her way, my friends in Europe can rest assured that boycotting US billionaire-owned apps has never been easier. And for we Americans too, of course.
