We are in a world where most of us use American “Big Tech” these days for our online presence and social interactions. However, as a recent article in The Guardian says:
There’s not much to love about big tech these days. So many ills can be laid at its door: social media harms, misinformation, polarisation, mining and misuse of personal data, environmental negligence, tax avoidance, the list goes on. Added to which, Silicon Valley’s leaders seem all too keen to cosy up to the Trump administration, to shower the president with bribes – sorry, gifts – and remain silent about his worsening political overreach. And that’s before we get to the rampant “enshittification”, as the tech writer Cory Doctorow describes it, which means that by design many big tech products have become less useful and more extractive than they were when we originally signed up to them.
I’ve tried to extract myself as much as possible from their grasp – I left Facebook years ago, left Twitter once Musk got his hands on it, and never wanted to open Instagram or Tik Tok accounts. Wherever possible I don’t use Google – I use DuckDuckGo as my search engine – but since I have an Android smartphone (an ancient Microsoft Surface Duo 2), I’m still enmeshed in their services to some extent. And unfortunately, despite using Signal, I still have to keep a WhatsApp account open because the majority of my smartphone contacts use it.
And while I try and minimise my engagement with Meta and Google, I am currently firmly in the grip of Microsoft. Not just with my PCs’ operating systems – they all run Windows 11 – but with the applications I use daily: mail (Outlook), chat (Teams), word processing (Word)and spreadsheets (Excel). Not only that, but my online storage is all in OneDrive. The applications and online storage are all bundled together in the Microsoft 365 product.
To be honest, I don’t really have any enthusiasm for switching from Windows 11 to a Desktop Linux world – too many of the other applications I use are Windows-based – I’ll just continue to hold my nose and disable as much of Microsoft’s data gathering and AI interference (CoPilot is even more irritating than Clippy was) as I can. I could switch from the use of Microsoft’s Office applications to use LibreOffice, but there will be a relearning cost involved. My muscle memory of Word is the product of years of use… And there are alternatives to Outlook and OneDrive available.
So the big question becomes should I stay with Microsoft 365 or go with the alternatives?
It’s not just individuals pondering this question – since the arrival of Trump, many European organisations and governments are doing the same. The trigger was the Trump administration’s sanction of Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor of the ICC. That resulted in the ICC removing Khan’s access to their Microsoft 365 system. The Volkskrant reported last month that Microsoft had told the ICC the sanctions meant it had to deny Khan access to its services. The report said the ICC would have to end the chief prosecutor’s access to the services, otherwise Microsoft would end the email services for the whole organization. The ICC then decided to suspend Kahn’s email services. The ICC has since cut their ties with Microsoft and Microsoft 365 and now uses openDesk, an open source office and collaboration suite provided by the German Center for Digital Sovereignty (ZenDiS).
In April last year, Microsoft announced a European Digital Resilience Commitment which it said would include in all of its contracts with European national governments and the European Commission.
“We will make this commitment legally binding on Microsoft Corporation and all its subsidiaries,” it said in a blog post. The company said it would “continue our fight to protect the rights of European customers.”
That sounded all fine, until Microsoft later admitted that it couldn’t actually guarantee data sovereignty.
This should be a wakeup call to European organisations and governments.
Is it also a wakeup call for me?
I’m trialling Proton Mail (an alternative to Outlook) and Proton Drive (an alternative to OneDrive) to find out. Watch this space.
Addendum: This report by the Norwegian Consumer Council on “Enshittification” describes the situation very well.
Geoff Coupe's Blog 