At a market stall in Berlin run by charity Topio, volunteers help people who want to purge their phones of the influence of US tech firms. Since Donald Trump’s inauguration, the queue for their services has grown.
Interest in European-based digital services has jumped in recent months, data from digital market intelligence company Similarweb shows. More people are looking for e-mail, messaging and even search providers outside the US.
The first months of Trump’s second presidency have shaken some Europeans’ confidence in their long-time ally, after he signalled his country would step back from its role in Europe’s security and then launched a trade war.
“It’s about the concentration of power in US firms,” said Topio’s founder Michael Wirths, as his colleague installed on a customer’s phone a version of the Android operating system without hooks into the Google ecosystem.
Wirths said the type of people coming to the stall had changed: “Before, it was people who knew a lot about data privacy. Now it’s people who are politically aware and feel exposed.”
Tesla chief Elon Musk, who also owns social media company X, was a leading adviser to the US president before the two fell out, while the bosses of Amazon, Meta and Google-owner Alphabet took prominent spots at Trump’s inauguration in January.
Days before Trump took office, outgoing president Joe Biden had warned of an oligarchic “tech industrial complex” threatening democracy.
Berlin-based search engine Ecosia says it has benefited from some customers’ desire to avoid US counterparts like Microsoft’s Bing or Google, which dominates web searches and is also the world’s biggest email provider.
“The worse it gets, the better it is for us,” founder Christian Kroll said of Ecosia, whose sales pitch is that it spends its profits on environmental projects.
Similarweb data shows the number of queries directed to Ecosia from the European Union has risen 27 per cent year-on-year and the company says it has 1pc of the German search engine market.
But its 122 million visits from the 27 EU countries in February were dwarfed by 10.3 billion visits to Google, whose parent Alphabet made revenues of about $100bn from Europe, the Middle East and Africa in 2024 – nearly a third of its $350bn global turnover.
Non-profit Ecosia earned 3.2m euros ($3.65m) in April, of which 770,000 euros were spent on planting 1.1m trees.
The search for alternative providers accompanies a debate in Europe about “digital sovereignty” – the idea that reliance on companies from an increasingly isolationist US is a threat to Europe’s economy and security.
“Ordinary people, the kind of people who would never have thought it was important they were using an American service are saying, ‘hang on!’,” said UK-based internet regulation expert Maria Farrell. “My hairdresser was asking me what she should switch to.”
Use in Europe of Swiss-based ProtonMail rose 11.7pc year-on-year to March compared to a year ago, according to Similarweb, while use of Alphabet’s Gmail, which has some 70pc of the global email market, slipped 1.9pc.
ProtonMail, which offers both free and paid-for services, said it had seen an increase in users from Europe since Trump’s re-election, though it declined to give a number.
“My household is definitely disengaging,” said British software engineer Ken Tindell, citing weak US data privacy protections as one factor.
Trump’s vice president JD Vance shocked European leaders in February by accusing them – at a conference usually known for displays of transatlantic unity – of censoring free speech and failing to control immigration.
US social media companies like Facebook and Instagram parent Meta have said the European Union’s Digital Services Act amounts to censorship of their platforms.
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