Can Switzerland live without Big Tech? We put it to the test

Swissinfo journalists Sara Ibrahim and Kristian Foss Brandt tried to disconnect from Big Tech in their daily lives. Vera Leysinger / SWI swissinfo.ch

Series Can Switzerland – and the Swiss – live without Big Tech?, Episode 1:

Switzerland wants digital sovereignty, but can it really distance itself from Big Tech? Two Swissinfo journalists tried cutting ties with US tech giants. Here’s what happened. 

At 6:30 in the morning, my iPhone alarm rings. Before 7am, I have used at least five more American technologies: WhatsApp (Meta); LinkedIn (Microsoft); Gmail (Alphabet); Teams and Outlook (Microsoft). And I still have not even washed my face.

Most of my digital life – from photos of my daughter’s first days to my passwords and personal documents – is stored somewhere in Big Tech’s cloud infrastructure. Almost every interaction with the outside world, private or professional, passes through a handful of US companies.

The more I report on Switzerland’s push for “digital sovereignty” – the idea that essential technologies and data should remain under local control – the more I wonder what this would look like on a personal level. Could I become independent of Big Tech? And could an entire country?

My colleague Kristian had been asking himself the same questions. Earlier this year, he decided to cut the cord with Big Tech and I joined him on his journey to digital independence. 

We started with the basics: our computers, email, phones, cloud services and AI tools. We imagined the process would entail a few simple switches – one service out, another service in.

In reality, it felt more like pulling roots out of dry soil: possible, yes, but slow and messy. We were soon living in a sort of parallel world where mobile payments stopped working, work tools broke and we found ourselves locked out of services we had used for most of our lives.

>> What happens when you try to cut ties with Big Tech? Here’s how our experiment and our new series “Can Switzerland – and the Swiss – live without Big Tech?” began:

Trapped in the ecosystem

The problem, we learned, is not a single app or platform. It is the ecosystem Big Tech companies have built around our digital lives. Escaping it takes time, money and energy.

Switzerland is home to a high number of privacy-focused technology companies offering alternatives beyond Big Tech. They include e-mail provider Proton, cloud storage provider Tresorit and chat interface Threema. So we had options.

When Kristian began replacing mainstream services with alternatives, he noticed that many doors suddenly closed. Like millions of people, he had used Gmail for years without thinking much about it. It was reliable, simple and connected to almost everything.

Switching providers did not mean simply changing inboxes but untangling years of accounts, logins and services built around Google’s products.

“Gmail had become less like an email account and more like a bunch of keys I carried without noticing,” he says. “One for the bank, one for public transport, one for health insurance, one for almost everything else.”

Can Switzerland – and the Swiss – live without Big Tech?

In this multi-part series, Swissinfo journalists Kristian Foss Brandt and Sara Ibrahim attempt to replace core technologies from major US tech companies in their daily and professional lives – including Windows, Android, Google services, cloud platforms and AI tools – with Swiss or European alternatives where possible. 

The goal is to test whether digital sovereignty is realistic at the individual level and what this reveals about Switzerland’s broader technological dependence and the possibility of reducing it. 

Proton argues that email often becomes the gateway into a much wider technological dependency. Once users choose a provider, other services tend to follow, like document and password managing apps, photo storage, calendar, messaging.

“Our real competitor isn’t just Gmail,” Proton COO Raphael Auphan told Swissinfo. “It’s Google Workspace and Microsoft 365.”

I encountered the same issue while trying to move away from Apple and Google.

Replacing my nearly new Apple iPhone 16 meant buying a Fairphone 5, branded as a more ethical European alternative, for its durability and more responsibly sourced materials. Then came the fiddly effort of installing /e/OS, an open-source mobile operating system that is still based on Android (owned by Google) but stripped of most Google services.

The user experience was smoother than I expected. But I soon found out what it means to move away from a smartphone ecosystem dominated by a few global vendors.

Without Google and Apple services, I could no longer pay conveniently with my phone, rely on integrated password and calendar apps or even access some work applications. Two-factor authentication – used to secure access to many services – became harder to manage, and I had to fall back on SMS-based verification codes instead of more secure passkeys.

“Don’t switch to open source if your only motivation is saving money while changing nothing else. You’ll be disappointed,” Jonas Sulzer warned us. He is a computer science student at the Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) and co-president of Digitale Integrität Schweiz, a new party against technological surveillance.

He was right.

Switzerland’s invisible dependence

Our personal experiment quickly revealed that Switzerland’s dependence on foreign technology goes beyond individuals’ phones. It is systemic, economic and political.

American providers account for 78%External link of cloud services used in Switzerland. Up to 80%External link of publicly traded Swiss firms in critical sectors such as energy, healthcare and utilities depend on US technology, reflecting a broader European trend.

Swiss federal and cantonal authorities are spending millions to migrate toward cloud infrastructure owned mainly by Chinese and US companies, such as Alibaba, Microsoft and Amazon. Key services including customs, healthcare and parts of public administration already run on Big Tech cloud servers, according to Swiss magazine RepublikExternal link.

Efforts to reduce this dependence are accelerating. In 2024, parliament agreed to invest nearly CHF250 million for a project that includes the development of a sovereign cloud infrastructureExternal link for the federal administration by 2032. In December 2025, it also decided that the Swiss army would allocate CHF10 million to open-source alternativesExternal link to Microsoft Office 365.

“The army must help civil authorities work on an exit strategy from Microsoft,” says Green party parliamentarian Gerhard Andrey, one of the key voices in Switzerland’s digitalisation debate.

>> Why Switzerland’s path to digital independence remains difficult:

The federal administration has recently started to testExternal link open-source solutions such as openDesk and Linux with encouraging results, despite internal resistanceExternal link and doubts about their maturity and stability.  

Compared to its neighbours, however, Switzerland is still moving cautiously. France has already instructedExternal link several of its government ministries to plan for reduced reliance on non-European technologies, while the German state of Schleswig-Holstein has migrated much of its administration to open-source software.

The German Chancellor Friedrich Merz (centre) and French President Emmanuel Macron (right) are joining forces to push for greater European digital sovereignty and reduce dependence on US tech giants. John Macdougall / AFP

Why leaving Big Tech is so difficult

Reducing dependence on Big Tech is possible. But it is far from painless. 

Once ecosystems such as Microsoft 365 become deeply integrated into workflows and habits – with email, cloud storage, office software and logins tied into the same platform – leaving them requires costly migrations and major organisational change.

This dynamic is called “vendor lock-in”. The more organisations rely on a single ecosystem, the harder it becomes to leave it, even when alternatives exist. “Depending on the organisation, it can take two to sever years to migrate away from Big Tech,” says Pascal Stöckli, co-founder of Netzwerk SDS, a Swiss initiative promoting digitally sovereign solutions. 

The same logic applies to individuals. While the initial choice of an iPhone or Android device, or a Mac or Windows laptop is often deliberate, users slide into a wider ecosystem as services work seamlessly together, and switching becomes increasingly difficult.

Freedom and friction

Despite frequently feeling frustrated when we tried to move away from Big Tech platforms, there were moments when the experiment felt liberating. 

We became more conscious of how much of our digital behaviour had been shaped not by deliberate choices, but by convenience, defaults and invisible dependencies. 

We also began seeing “free” services differently. 

According to Proton’s research, the average American user’s data generates approximately $1,605 per year for Google – more than $16,000 over a decade. 

The experiment did not free us from Big Tech overnight. In many ways, complete independence for individuals and nations still feels unrealistic. But it revealed how much of modern Swiss life depends on technologies built, owned and ultimately controlled elsewhere.

Lukas Kahwe Smith, an open-source technology expert at the Bern University of Applied Sciences, thinks that transitioning from Big Tech is a question of critical mass. Kristian learned this when he substituted Threema for WhatsApp but found only one contact with whom to chat.  

“If you’re the first, then you have the biggest pain. But the more people that do the switch, the less painful it will be,” Kahwe Smith says. 

We’ll share more about our experiences distancing from Big Tech in the next parts of this series. Sign up for Swissinfo’s science newsletter to get them in your inbox.  

Edited by Gabe Bullard/VdV

Series Can Switzerland – and the Swiss – live without Big Tech?

• Episode 1: 1. Can Switzerland live without Big Tech? We put it to the test
• Episode 2: 2. Is it possible to live and work without Big Tech?