U.S tech backlash grows as countries and startups seek alternatives

In just the past week, France has banned its public officials from using American technology, more governments are considering keeping young people off Silicon Valley’s biggest social media platforms, and UpScrolled saw a surge in users over censorship fears on TikTok in the U.S. All of these moves point to a growing unease with U.S. tech firms and tech policy.

“The backlash against U.S. tech companies, and the global market dependencies on the American tech stack, is part of a broader recognition that technology is not neutral, and that the companies that produce and shape this ecosystem have social and political interests in addition to their financial interests,” Jathan Sadowski, a senior lecturer at the Emerging Technologies Research Lab at Monash University in Melbourne, told Rest of World. “I don’t think this is just a phase.”

Shortly after the TikTok deal was announced last week, handing control of its U.S. operations to a conglomerate that includes Oracle Corporation, #TikTokCensorship began trending online. Tens of thousands of users in the U.S., U.K., and Australia joined UpScrolled, a new platform that promises to be a haven for free speech. UpScrolled quickly became one of the most downloaded social media apps in the U.S., and has reached more than 1 million users.

Issam Hijazi, the Palestinian-Australian founder of UpScrolled, credits much of the platform’s recent success to a perception of politically motivated moderation on platforms like TikTok, he told Rest of World. 

“A lot of people were asking why there is no alternative to the big tech platforms for their content, which was getting censored,” he said. “So I thought, why don’t we build our own?”

The European Union, which has attempted to rein in big tech companies with the Digital Markets Act, is pushing homegrown options to products from Meta, Google, and Microsoft — including TomTom and Here for navigation, and Visio for video calls. At the same time, more countries are acting to keep young users off social media platforms. India, the biggest market for Facebook and YouTube, is the latest to suggest regulating access.

Paris Marx, the Canadian host of the “Tech Won’t Save Us” podcast and a longtime critic of U.S. big tech companies, has been documenting his gradual — and sometimes frustrating — switch to non-U.S. alternatives. His guide lists mostly European options for email, search, maps and streaming, as well as Zoho, an Indian company that offers products similar to Google at cheaper prices.

Zoho’s Arattai messaging service, pitched as a rival to WhatsApp, is endorsed by Indian government officials pushing the “Made in India” policy. They also backed Koo as an option to X. Elsewhere In Asia, Japan’s Line super-app, and South Korea’s KakaoTalk messaging app and Naver Map are dominant in their countries, with Line also preferred in much of Southeast Asia. Line has more than 200 million monthly users, while KakaoTalk has about 55 million users. Regional ride hailing apps such as Grab and Gojek have fended off Uber, with Grab building its own mapping system.

There is a realization that U.S. tech companies’ policies and products “often fail to reflect the needs and realities of users in the global majority,” Mona Shtaya, campaigns and partnerships director in the Middle East and North Africa at lobby group Digital Action, told Rest of World.

“It is interesting to see new, locally developed and owned platforms emerge,” she said. “Their success or failure will depend on whether these platforms are genuinely responsive to community needs — and on how communities themselves participate in shaping and governing them.”

The push for non-U.S. options is also about data security. Last year, Trump signed an executive order sanctioning the International Criminal Court and its chief prosecutor, British lawyer Karim Khan, for issuing an arrest warrant against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. As part of that move, Microsoft reportedly cancelled Khan’s email address. Khan switched to the Swiss provider Proton Mail, which has over 100 million users worldwide. 

Fears of a U.S. digital “kill switch” led the ICC to drop Microsoft as a service provider, and prompted European lawmakers to question the security of cloud services provided by Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. These concerns are also pushing some countries to develop their own semiconductor industry. Chinese open-source foundation models are already enabling small countries and companies to build their own large language models.

For smaller countries, the main challenge in translating social and political criticism of U.S. tech companies into successful alternatives is funding, Sadowski said.

“Many startups, even outside of the U.S. tech stack, still depend heavily on Silicon Valley for venture capital and other forms of support to build alternatives,” he said. “If governments want to take tech sovereignty seriously — and they should — then that means building capacity for indigenous innovations and ecosystems that are disconnected from the domination of U.S. tech firms.”

UpScrolled’s Hijazi knows he faces a huge challenge, despite the surge of interest in his platform.

“I’ll be lying to you if I tell you I know the answer to how to hold on to the initial interest,” he said. “But … there is an awakening globally, and people know they have been played by the big tech companies and are looking for alternatives. I’m counting on that.”