What the American Tech Exit Looks Like

Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

Part 2 of 3 in a series about reclaiming independence from American (Big) Tech.

You’ve maybe begun to see the strained EU-US tech relationship in media, together with positioning in the EU to become more technologically independent.

Beware: This is not just a Trump thing—this is for the long run. Trust is, as any adult knows, hard to earn and easy to lose. Right now the US is losing some of its historical trust, but certainly not only in the EU!

For me as a professional in the tech field, and generally as someone interested in this area, the effects are quite tangible, so I thought I’d mention what it means in the most concrete way possible: where I conduct business, as evidenced by accounts I retain post-exit.

For context, I’ve been deep in the cloud industry for quite some time, and have used technology intensely since the mid 90s: As a boy I looked at scantily clad ladies in ye olden days when a single JPG took half a minute to load (and would be disappointingly interrupted by Mom lifting the phone receiver), in a time when ordering CDs online involved using an unsafe HTTP connection and posting money in the mail. Many things were certainly not better back then—but God!—technology sure was much simpler and more exciting then.

This means I’ve grown a significant presence on the internet. Removing that is tantamount to chopping off very long relationships. As with any relationship, some are good, some are bad, and some just got to go.

And the time to cut dependencies and ties is now, especially with any players that default-function by bad business practices (e.g. extracting your data and behavior), provide services that are too critical to rely on them providing, or who don’t pass the test of whether the service is meaningful (net-beneficial) at all, in the first place.

The “American tech exit” is as good a time as any to clean house.

To put that statement in perspective, I no longer have accounts on, among many other places:

• Any and all social media; I exited Meta platforms already ~7 years ago (?) and LinkedIn was last to go ~15 months ago
• Amazon, incl. Amazon Web Services
• Google, incl. Google Cloud Platform and of course Gmail, Youtube…
• Microsoft or anything it touches
• OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, etc.
• Signal (a decent app and org, all told) or any other (much worse!) big DM/spyware app, e.g. Whatsapp…
• PayPal
• Merchant sites paying via PayPal
• Atlassian or anything it touches
• Any and all American gaming services (e.g. Steam, Activision, EA, Blizzard, Humble Bundle…)
• Figma
• Ticketmaster
• Spark/Positive Grid. Instead, I bought a Japanese (traditional, stupid, great!) guitar amp WITH KNOBS. God, why do I keep buying connected f***ing things %&#…

The above is a subset of the bigger names of who’s gone in the toilet in the last year or so. This would help explain why, as I wrote recently, my total number of accounts is now at an all-time low.

The effect: All of the above are businesses that no longer get my eyeballs and attention, money, or data. I am dead to them, and they sure are stone dead forever to me.

Of course, at work, we already strongly prefer European alternatives across our stack where possible (hardware still being the true China/US moat), so greenfield relations are based on the assumption that only very few non-EU suppliers will be used.

And before you go stir-crazy with me, let’s be real. While I may be a tiny bit extreme, I also am not an absolutist—I do indeed still keep a few select services!

The reasons why I keep some American services differ, though:

Community and sharing/distribution

• Medium, for the readership. Note that I wasn’t writing at all on Medium for most of 2025 as part of an idea to stop doing that altogether—now I’m “back”, I guess? I built medium-exfiltrator years ago to convert Medium articles to HTML pages I keep on my blog in order to not be locked in.
• GitHub, for the sharing of open-source code. GitHub is not a hard dependency for me, as I already backup code elsewhere, so it’s all for sharing.
• Stripe, for any payments coming via Medium and GitHub. Definitely not needed, strictly speaking, as it’s not (by far) my primary income source. But it does allow me to move back money.

Development

• Cloudflare, since it’s still a great developer platform and lets me do the most boring parts involved in a wide web presence for free, such as domain registration, DNS management and static page hosting. To be fair, I’ve got everything I need to replace it, so this is just convenience and appreciation of good product.

Other

• Apple, for its tight software/hardware ecosystem and being at least a tiny bit less of scumbags than others in that game. This also happens to be the hardest thing on my list to remove; here too it is more convenience and “good product” over hard, practical reasons. Concentrating on a single supplier in this need (connecting laptops, phones, TV, subscriptions, home audio…) is a way to accept one “larger” dependency over sharing that with many, disintegrated (and often worse) parties.
• American video streaming services that I keep rotating. However, this is technically more a family thing, rather than a me thing.

Well, that’s pretty much the net list. As you see, from the above I could pretty painlessly hack out most of it before it starts hurting for real.

Most importantly, there is no critical dependency on any of the above. Articles live elsewhere, as does all my code. My Apple account stores very little master/leading data that I deeply care about. Websites can always be hosted elsewhere—the only real pain would be a hypothetical outright theft of domains.

I don’t have the data to show what this worsening relationship is costing the US economy (if anything), but I’d guess it’s still somewhat contained on the GDP level. That can change, and I think it definitely will.

Regarding my own situation, I am now likely net-extracting more money from US channels/companies than I am paying them in total. The proportion of my personal software costs is also now majorly distributed in favor of European companies.

When the pendulum actually starts swinging for real, the momentum for this change (or exit) will grow a lot not the least because of the legislative push within the EU, as seen at the top of this article. Also, when the previously rich-but-lazy EU market has created their own alternatives, new markets that previously did not exist now suddenly do exist. The reason to switch suppliers will become increasingly slim once you’ve found a new home—this is the same laziness + platform effects that American companies built their own empires on previously. It can be done again, by others.

And not to forget: Software oligopolies like those of Microsoft, Steam, EA are cancers on a functioning free market. They use entrenched positions to create less value at higher cost, making it more miserable for producers and consumers alike (the games industry is a good example), while retaining market position and value only for shareholders to enjoy. This is untenable. At least for me, leaving US tech is also about making a move toward simply denying companies like these their continued dominion. The way to break them is to deny them attention, money, support. You wanted capitalism? You got oligopoly. Enjoy. If you are a believer in the free market, choose something else. If it does not exist, build it.

Again, to recap, what I did was:

In the last 18 months I’ve dropped several dozens of services and accounts to which I will most likely never return, including those of mammoth providers that some, inexplicably, find impossible to leave emotionally or otherwise. These services were unceremoniously axed because of a combination of reasons: a) they were (American companies) providing services too critical to rely on; b) because I no longer want to support their business practices (i.e. enshittification, greed, manipulation, surveillance…); c) because they could be replaced by good options or be outright removed; remember that I’m a minimalist at heart.

So, that’s what the American tech exit looks like for a European techie like me, if you ever wondered.

Oh, right… if I can do it, so can you, whether you are European, American, or any other human being.