How I got rid of American Technology and why you should too

Introduction

For those living in Europe, it’s no secret that we are navigating a complex and volatile global landscape. Recent actions by the United States including its inhumane stance on Gaza (Segal 2025), missile strikes in Iran (Rothwell 2025), and the kidnapping of Venezuela’s leader (Mascaro, Goodman, and Finley 2026) have raised serious concerns. Add to this the problematic TikTok acquisition and content controls (Belanger 2026), and even the surreal speculation about purchasing Greenland (Abels 2026). It’s understandable to feel a sense of dismay.

Yet in moments like these, action matters more than despair. As businesses and consumers, we hold more power than we might realize. If Europe collectively shifts away from American software and cloud services toward homegrown alternatives, we can send a clear message while building a more independent, self-sufficient digital economy.

Finding alternatives

It’s easy to think that we don’t have alternatives here in Europe, but this is simply not true. There’s a long list of alternatives (Graf 2025) which can be utilized. Both commercial and open source software and solutions are available. Even if you don’t really know what to look for you can use the categories to navigate when looking for “Cloud” replacements for example.

This should be enough for anyone to get started. I cannot say that it doesn’t involve work, but I can say that it’s worth it. Every second of it.

Key Advantages of EU Alternatives:

✅ GDPR Compliance by design
✅ EU Data Sovereignty (data stays within EU borders)
✅ Avoids US Cloud Act jurisdiction
✅ Often open-source and self-hostable
✅ Privacy-focused by default

What about hardware?

Hardware often comes up as a problematic area on our way towards independence, and while it’s true that when it comes to mobile phones and laptops we have few optionshere in the EU these options do exist. One example of a european phone maker is Jolla which is a bunch of ex Nokia guys making a cool new phone. Another is HMD which is part of the Better Phone Project and creates european phones.

When it comes to computers there are also alternatives of course. One cool supplier here is Slimbook who produce beautiful computers that come with Linux or Windows preinstalled. Naturally, since this is about European alternatives I would strongly suggest that you choose a Linux based operating system.

What I have done

I have a pretty large setup where I have used a bunch of different technologies but I will list the ones I think most people will want an alternative to.

mindmap
  root((European<br>Software))
    Cloud Providers
        Hetzner
        Contabo
        Nextcloud
    Communication
        Proton Mail
        Mailbox.org
        Thunderbird
    Social Networks
        Signal
        Mostodon.Social
    Office Productivity
        Libreoffice
        Nextcloud
    Photo & Video & Music
        Immich
        Synchthing
        Deezer
        JellyFin
    Browsers
        Firefox
        Zen-Browser
    Maps
        OpenStreetMap
        HERE WeGo
    Search
        Startpage
        Qwant

Communication

Email is obviously the elephant in the room as I assume many are using Gmail today. I replaced my Gmail with Proton mail. They have a free alternative which was good enough for me and my family.

For instant messaging I replaced Whatsapp, Google Chat etc. with Signal wich is free and secure.

Productivity

This was a no brainer as Microsoft Office (Excel, Word, PowerPoint et. al.) was easily replaced with LibreOffice.

Cloud versions like Teams, Sharepoint I replaced with Nextcloud which can be self-hosted or commercially hosted for you. In my opinion this is also much easier and safer to work with than Microsoft or Google cloud. Or as they themselves put it:

Regain control over your data

The better Microsoft 365 for private clouds.

Photos and Videos

I replaced Google Photos with a self-hosted Immich server. This allows me to keep all my photos backed up and they are sitting safely on my own hardware on my own network. My whole family is synching their photos from their phone to our family drive where each of them have their own passwords and accounts. We can also use shared folders to share memories and events with our extended family and loved ones. Again this was super easy to setup and all it took was a Raspberry PI with a 4 TB drive and some docker knowledge. If you don’t know how to do it I bet you know someone around you that does. I don’t know about you, but I feel much better knowing the photos of my children do not end up in Google’s or any other big cloud providers drives.

Hardware

I replaced my OnePlus Nord (which I really love by the way) with a Jolla C2. It took some getting used to but in general all is working well.

My laptop I got from Slimbook as mentioned above and as I’m running Arch Linux this was not only a good alternative, it was a better choice altogether since I didn’t have to deal with compatibility issues with computers made for Microsoft Windows.

Conclusion

Switching to European and open-source alternatives is an important move toward two vital goals:

Building a strong, independent Europe capable of digital self-reliance.
Peacefully protesting harmful policies promoted by the current US administration.

As the old saying goes:

A friend who bullies us is no longer a friend.

The tools for change are already here. It’s time we used them.

References

Abels, Grace. 2026. “Fact-Checking Trump’s Text on Greenland and Denmark — Politifact.com.” https://www.politifact.com/article/2026/jan/20/denmark-greenland-trump-written-documents-own/.

Belanger, Ashley. 2026. “TikTok Users ‘Absolutely Justified’ in Fearing MAGA Makeover, Experts Say — Arstechnica.com.” https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/tiktok-claimed-bugs-blocked-anti-ice-videos-epstein-mentions-experts-call-bs; Ars Technica.

Graf, Constantin. 2025. “European Alternatives — European-Alternatives.eu.” https://european-alternatives.eu/.

Mascaro, Lisa, Joshua Goodman, and Ben Finley. 2026. “Was Trump’s Attack on Venezuela Illegal? — Independent.co.uk.” https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/trump-illegal-venezuela-attack-international-law-maduro-b2894605.html.

Rothwell, Donald. 2025. “Why the US Strikes on Iran Are Illegal and Can Set a Troubling Precedent — Theconversation.com.” https://theconversation.com/why-the-us-strikes-on-iran-are-illegal-and-can-set-a-troubling-precedent-259542.

Segal, Raz. 2025. “The Genocide in Gaza Is Far from over | Raz Segal — Theguardian.com.” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/28/the-genocide-in-gaza-is-far-from-over.