Ask Lemmy

Other companies would come in to fill the void and we'll have new tech giants, if not in the US then elsewhere. The point is nothing will change, these tech giants are what they are today is because they ultimately provides services that a lot of people want to use. I don't see them going anywhere.

However, for the spirit of your question, if we just remove the corporate world from the internet, the internet will be what it used to be 20-30 years ago. It'll be largely run by nerds and enthusiasts, and the user base will be a lot smaller and more niche based.

I feel like Zuckerfuck made this post for ideas on how to circumvent competition.

Lemmy. Peertube. Matrix. Codeburg. Mistral if i cant reach local AI.

Only real lack i have access to movies and shows, and losing steam for new downloads. So that time would have to be spent elsewhere

Of course too, how much of these services would be wiped out with out big tech for auth (sign in fron google, etc) and big tech from cloud services (AWS, Cloudflare, GCP, etc).

The same way we did it before those things existed or had taken over. Believe it or not, the internet used to be that way 👴

Funny, but for me very little would change. The only one of those I use even occasionally is YT, and the videos would start appearing elsewhere. Peertube, maybe?

EDIT: Oh, I'd lose my steam library. That would be a nuisance!

In that world, what would you use the Internet for?

Pretty much the same as before?

The only giant tech firm from your list I am actively engaged with is ~~Google~~ Alphabet because of Android and YouTube. Apart from that, there is PayPal because of online payments and WhatsApp because of other people. But for both, I have 1:1 replacements already in place to be used wherever available.

Most of those US services (YouTube, Twitter, etc.) arose to fill a niche which was opened by expanding access and bandwidth. Take YouTube as an example, the idea of sharing a video on a dial-up connection was simply silly. Just downloading the contents of a 1.44MB floppy on a 14.4kbps modem took forever. Even when we got to a 56kbps modem, pictures could still be slow and GIFs were painful to download. It wasn't until home DSL or cable connections became common that sharing a video was even close to reasonable. In that environment, we saw the start of media sharing services rushing to fill a previously unknown "need". The most well known was Napster for music sharing, but we also saw the start of bittorrent clients. While not exactly legal, early music sharing and torrent sites showed that people wanted to be able to download media. And with sites like MySpace or GeoCities cropping up, it was apparent that people wanted to also create and share media. YouTube simply married up those two desires at a time where the technology could reasonably support it. And they have massively capitalized on the first mover advantage. With them also having Google money to scale the service, they now sit in a fairly privileged position in their niche.

I bring this up to say that, were US based services snapped out of existence, new services would arise to fill the gap. If you look at somewhere like China, where access to US services is highly regulated, they aren't simply doing without, they are creating their own alternatives. TikTok is a good example, while it lacks the longer form videos of YouTube, it did provide media sharing in China. Were YouTube to be blocked at the Great Firewall, TikTok is in a good position to expand into the longer form videos. China also already has WeChat which fills much of the Twitter and FaceBook nice. Russia has VKontakte for those spaces as well. Basically, any place which isn't well served by US based media giants has their own solutions to fill those gaps.

Western Europe (using EU as shorthand, though yes I know the EU isn't all of Western Europe) has the issue of being closely linked with the US economically and culturally. US based services can operate in most EU countries with little friction. Sure, they have to figure out GDPR and Data Privacy issues, but that's not a major barrier, despite US companies' whining. So, given the size, first mover advantage and money behind the US based solutions, there hasn't been space for reasonable EU based replacements. Why use some second rate EU based system, when the US system works so well, and the EU and US are such good allies and closely linked?

Of course, that last bit is changing (which is part of why you're asking the question, no doubt). With the US Government going quickly off the rails, and US tech giants doing their damnedest to enshitify everything, the deep cultural links between the US and EU are starting to slip. There might now be space for EU based services to try to step in and replace services like YouTube or Twitter. And that's the answer to your question. If those services go away, they will be replaced by something else. In time, they are probably bound to be replaced anyway. At one time everyone though MySpace was here to stay, these days I suspect some folks had to google it to figure out what the hell I was going on about. It may be a long time to come, but I'd bet on YouTube eventually being replaced. I have no idea what will replace it, but nothing lasts forever.

porn? no change, furry porn sites aren't run by big tech

gaming? very little change as all I seem to be interested in lately is Space Station 14 and that's open source with a standalone launcher that doesn't require Steam

social media? nearly all of that for me is just mastodon and lemmy.

youtube videos going away would suck for the lost knowledge and art and discussion, tho if it meant google died that's a price I'm willing to pay

So... Just like I already do today?

I suppose you didn't mean litterally just those, but many American companies.

But of the ones you listed, sure I don't really use any of them.

Tiktok? Really? Yuck. Facebook? Never have. Netflix? Do they even have anything good on anymore? Google? I haven't used their search index long time. And so on.

My email has never been a major provider.

I'd use a different search engine... and the rest of those I don't use now. That's not the Internet to me. I read webcomics and blogs, check fora, and play online games. I go directly to the websites I want, or I use RSS to get there from my aggregator. Hell, I still use webrings.

Happily.

I don't use Twitter, Facebook, Netflix, Apple, Google search, TikTok, or ChatGPT.

I use Amazon to order N95 masks a couple times per year but that can be done with other sites.

Twitter = Mastodon or Bluesky

Netflix = Torrent

Apple/Google = GrapheneOS if we are talking phone OS. Perhaps Linux if both companies are gone.

Google search = DuckDuckGo, Esonia, Brave

ChatGPT = I don't trust any "AI" to give a factual answer.

Youtube = Odyssey, Bitchute, there is a video site in the Fediverse but the name escapes me at the moment.

Imagine there is no...

YT - dont use it. Don't like video tutorials, I prefer to read them, don't like adverts or propaganda!

no Twitter/X, no Facebook - not used them I over ten years

no Netflix, no Amazon - stopped using a few years ago

no Apple - never used

no Google to to search the Web - plenty of other search engines

no chatGPT - soon won't be there for anyone!

I get my apps from F-droid, I read my web comics on websites, I send emails, I chat with my friends.

Does steam go in your scenario? In that case I imagine GoG will take over there!

You know, the only reason these companies have so much power over your government and so much of your money is they've tricked you that you're missing out without them. 💁‍♂️

Like I did 25 years ago. We'd all use more different websites and that would be it. I'll gladly take these giant corpos for granted because if they disappeared, the market would not disappear with them. There would be others which would replace them and in the beginning, they would all be small companies or community driven efforts. A glory to behold.

What do you really think there corporations can offer that can't be replaced by anyone else? Shit, google in the 90's was two guys in a garage and ebay was someone's old computer used as a server and it worked. It can all be replaced.

I would use the internet like I did back in 2005 I guess. Seriously... the necessity of these tech companies is a mixture of them sniffing their own farts too much, propaganda from them to ensure they are perceived as essential, and finally people being too lazy to find alternatives.

I used the internet for decades before any of the services you list existed. These days I use a few of them, but if they disappeared tomorrow I'd just go back to how things used to be.

We're literally talking on Lemmy/Piefed right now, which would continue to work so I would just come here for recommendations on which search engines and websites to use as alternatives lol

US tech is a big pile of garbage.

All of it is to make you addicted, to track you, to influence you, to collect all sort of intel about you, and then use that against you. And they will serve you ads as the cherry on top.

For me they can all disappear and be gone. There are plenty of activities (internet or otherwise) that can be done without that pile of shit.

I have Proton with custom domain as email service, I have my own encrypted backup in an European VPS, have my own private cloud also in European VPS.

Don’t need US garbage.

🎵The internet is for porn.🎶

This question looks odd on the fediverse. It seems to assume there's no european alternatives to the sites mentioned here, which for most of them isn't true. Or that there are only giant tech alternatives.

You do realized piefed.social isn't giant tech, right?

I think with a world without access to US apps and online services, the biggest loss to humanity would be Wikipedia. If we narrow it to just giant tech, I think it's easily doable. It would be a shame to lose the wealth of content on Youtube, but it's something we can manage with.

In that world, what would you use the Internet for? How would you use it? And how much time do you think you would spend online, compared to now?

About the same as now? I mean, again, hobbyist social media exists, it's not just giant tech. We're literally using it. In such a hypothetical world, stuff like the fediverse would be much more popular.

I'm very happy suddenly. I would spend exactly the same amount of time online and do exactly the same things

How would I use internet?

Pretty much the way I use it now?

For maps I use OSM, with eventual searchs in HEREwego in case I don't find something.

I use proton and tuta as mail services.

I don't have any social media account (that is xitter, fb and the likes).

I don't use youtube at all (I prefer reading to watching a video):

For gaming I mostly play indies and they are rarely from the US, I could live without the US ones. Worst case, I love retrogaming, I can go for years with my chinese retro-handheld and the amount of roms and romhacks that exist right now

As for streaming? I'm all in stremio, and I despise usonian content (even more lately) so all I watch is European shows, korean shows and anime.

As I was writing this, I came to realize that I really don't depend at all of usonian shit. They could go to hell and banish from this world for what I care.

Sounds like paradise, can we make the US this way please?

I still use RSS quite a lot, both for articles and for podcasts.

Despite the quality of their results going down in recent years and getting worse because of AI slop, the search engines I would miss the most in terms of type of service. Most alternative search engine still use the indices of Google and/or Bing and the ones that don't, don't have a very big index. I'm old enough to remember a time when search engines were plentiful, but terrible, and back then I actually made use of web directories, like Yahoo! at the time, more. A still-existant example would be Curlie, an heir to dmoz, and there are also more local sites like the Dutch Startpagina. Being more dependent on things like that would probably make my web usage more exploratory and less about trying to find a specific piece of information quickly. And I would also go directly to specific websites more often when I do need specific information. But there are also a few companies working on making a European search index and this happening would undoubted accelerate their efforts, so depending on how that works out, not much might change at all.

Streaming-wise, there are local streaming services for films and TV shows and they would undoubtedly expand their offerings with the loss of competition from American giants, but also, I never stopped buying BDs and DVDs (in fact I have a backlog). I never understood the appeal of music streaming, so I still buy music, sometimes even on CD. As for something like YouTube, Nebula is America-based, but it's not "big tech", so I would watch more of that. Niconico Douga isn't what it used to be, but that might change without YouTube. And there would probably also be some movement towards federated video streaming.

I don't actually make use of any of the big social media platforms. Technically, I have a LinkedIn account, but I don't really use it and wouldn't miss it. It's not really social media, but I do use WhatsApp, but that being gone would just make it easier to convince friends and family to switch to something better.

The only difference is I wouldn't be able to use Amazon gift cards that I get given at work.

Is wikipedia in or out? Because that affects my answer a lot.
Same for xkcd.com

yeah, you're describing China. it fucking sucks ass if I'm honest

you can "just use VPN lol" but you might be surprised how difficult it is to use a lot of websites with a VPN IP address block. and people around you will generally not be using any of these websites, so the social networks are kind of useless. you basically live on The China App

Get a VPN and use Euro internet. Actually I'm starting to think that's a good idea anyway.

I would use that corporate-free Web for email, like we used to in the 90s) and for the Fediverse (the little of it I’m using). I would use it to read… blogs, and to post more regularly on my own blog too.

I don’t use social media much (beside here) and would not miss not accessing Whatsapp, Instagram, Twitter or whatever else. I have not used Google for search for quite a few years now, so that would not change much for me.

I would probably miss YT, though. I would try find alternatives to it and... to the majority of US content I’m subscribed to on YT.

I’m not much of a gamer and would not miss much there. I do play chess, mostly IRL and against people not machine, but I would probably still play from time to time online chess on Lichess (not US and not corporate owned, no tracking, no ads, free and open source).

I’ve quit using streaming services a few years ago, moving back to owning physical copies of the media I watch or listen to, and read.

Since, I use Free/Libre Software there is also no real dependency on any country of origin for them. Also, all those apps all work fully offline too. No need to even connect to the Internet to use them.

The same thing I use it for now, except it would be slower since I assume latency still matters.

I do use Youtube. Through newpipe though. I'll extend your premise , and presume there is no large tech company holding any site or service online. That also includes any generative AI.

How would I use internet?

Well, the same I did in the early 90s I guess. I can't fathom it would be long before some kind of search engine popped up though. I guess I'll be searching art online and sharing mine on platforms similar to Deviantart or the likes, if DA doesn't exist I one hundred percent believe there would be online forums dedicated to sharing art and connecting through messages. I would probably also be text roleplaying in forums as well. Those things still exist on a small scale today.

I guess I would also connect to check news to a couple official news sites if there is no such thing as rss. Same for weather forecast.

I wonder what the situation would be about maps. Without Google, would we still have something large and accessible such as OSMand? I believe not only we would, they would be better, and they would probably be easier to use downloaded locally so that's probably another thing I'd do.

Do we still have torrenting? I can see myself torrenting even more if I don't have any streaming platforms.

Well I guess I'd use a different Lemmy server. Probably a different Mastodon server too. I think I'd have the same Matrix server though, so that's nice.