A recent article in The Guardian highlighted the growing public interest in moving away from dominant corporate platforms such as Amazon, Google, Meta, Apple and X to more rights-respecting and sustainable alternatives, mentioning APC member GreenNet as one example of an ethical internet service provider. The article reflects an increasingly common concern: dependence on a concentrated number of big tech companies leaves communities vulnerable to surveillance, control, political interference and environmental harm. Yet much of the debate in the Global North still frames the issue primarily through market competition, for example, how Europe can reduce dependence on American technology giants by supporting European companies instead.
For many members and partners in the APC network, the challenge runs much deeper than replacing one corporate provider with another and is not as simple as assessing whether technology is headquartered in the United States, Europe or elsewhere, nor is it simply a matter of creating alternatives for individual personal choices. It is about who controls digital infrastructure and services, whose interests it serves, and whether communities have meaningful power and agency over the technologies they use. It means fostering an environment that encourages the development of diverse technologies, grounded in lived experiences, which can reinforce rights rather than undermine them.
Across APC’s network, there are member organisations who have spent years building community-centred and rights-respecting alternatives rooted in social and environmental justice alongside collective care. Their work offers a different vision of the digital future, one where infrastructure is seen not as a profit-driven extractivist commodity, but as a commons. Within this article we connect with several members and APC’s own tech team for their reflections on alternatives to big tech services.
What do we mean by ethical consumption?
One of the frequent concerns raised by APC members is the way discussions around big tech often reduce people to mere consumers who make individual transactions. For May First Movement Technology, this framing misses the political and communal nature of technology and tech choices. Operating as a member-run cooperative based in the United States and Mexico, May First provides web hosting, email, mailing lists, video conferencing, document sharing and collaboration and instant messaging services to activists and social justice organisations.
For the cooperative, moving away from big tech is not merely a technical preference or privacy choice; it is about collective self-determination. “Avoiding big tech means contributing to building technological autonomy,” said Jes Ciacci. “And autonomy is not isolation or individual self-sufficiency; it is the collective capacity to determine our own conditions of digital existence, based on free software and shared knowledge.
Furthermore, stepping away from a profit-driven approach and instead making rights-respecting technological choices acts as an important embodiment of our collective values. “Internet services are becoming increasingly intertwined with every aspect of our life, so building technology services based on our values rather than profit is an important step for our future,” explained May First’s Jamie McClelland.
This is critical because large tech companies are increasingly shaping what speech is amplified or repressed, and which communities become vulnerable to censorship, surveillance and other forms of online violence. We have witnessed repeated examples where corporate policies and moderation systems have disproportionately harmed activists, human rights defenders and marginalised communities. The risks are not hypothetical. Around the world, governments increasingly rely on commercial surveillance platforms, while tech corporations routinely comply with data requests or politically motivated takedowns with little transparency or accountability. As we have been increasingly seeing, particularly among marginalised communities and in conflict situations, these decisions can have devastating consequences.
For APC’s own tech team, avoiding big tech can mean “reducing complicity in horrors carried out in our name,” while also “regaining autonomy by either learning how tools work or empowering small communities who are themselves learning and operating the services we use.” Alongside advocacy efforts, APC’s tech team offers critical services to the network, including email addresses under the APC domain (for increased trust), access to BigBlueButton (an open source and secure teleconferencing platform), discussion in secure mailing lists, and a forthcoming platform currently under development members to be able to request and offer tech expertise and tools using APC's own intranet.
Echoing May First, APC’s tech team team points to the importance of people “not seeing themselves merely as ‘consumers’ but rather having the opportunity to understand the implications of the technologies which they are dependent on, including on a technical level.” The conversations emerging across APC’s network go beyond choosing different apps or providers. They are about reimagining our relationship with technology.
Building infrastructures rooted in justice
In Barcelona, APC member Pangea has spent years developing alternatives grounded in digital rights, environmental sustainability and social justice. Through initiatives such as Pangea.org, eReuse.org and Reutilitza.cat, the organisation offers ethical internet services including email, web hosting and digital tools designed for civil society organisations and activists who need trustworthy, transparent and values-aligned alternatives to commercial and big tech platforms.
Pangea’s work extends beyond digital services and includes coordinating ecosystems for reusing and redistributing digital devices. Working with institutions and social enterprises, it helps recover computers that would otherwise become waste, refurbishes them, and redistributes them to communities facing digital exclusion. Alongside this, Pangea develops open source tools to track devices throughout their lifespan and measure their environmental and social impact.
For Pangea, the problem with big tech is not only about privacy or monopolies. It is also about extractive economic and ecological models that treat both people and the planet as expendable resources. “The main benefit is regaining control over our data, our infrastructure, our digital services, and the social and environmental consequences of our digital choices,” explains Pangea’s Leandro Navarro.
This perspective resonates strongly across APC’s network, particularly among members working at the intersection of environmental justice and digital rights. Many note that the dominant technology industry reproduces the same extractive logic that has long characterised colonialism and resource exploitation: extracting value from territories and communities without accountability or equitable redistribution. May First describes this as “digital extractivism”, noting that big tech companies often operate through the same dynamics as extractive industries, that is, concentrating wealth and power while leaving behind environmental and social harm.
Against this backdrop, community-based infrastructures become not only technical alternatives, but also political and ecological interventions.
Technology as a commons
The concept of approaching technology as a commons rather than a proprietary commodity is shared by many APC members. This entails building systems based on collective knowledge, governance and support rather than competition. It also means challenging widespread assumptions that technological progress must always be driven by infinite growth. For many, some of the most meaningful technological practices are not necessarily the newest or most profitable, but those that strengthen communities and encourage active participation.
For Pangea, this means imagining a future where people move away from “passive consumption” towards active participation in shaping technology. This includes asking questions about whether devices can be repaired, whether services respect rights, and how technologies affect communities throughout their lifecycle. “We would like to see a shift from passive consumption to active, informed participation,” affirmed Navarro.
May First similarly calls for greater “technopolitical consciousness”, recognising that decisions about infrastructure are also decisions about power, governance and social organisation. “Even a small dream for me is to live in a time when the people who want to create a more just and sustainable world can stop choosing technology providers that are actively supporting war, genocide and other harms,” expressed May First’s Jaime Villarreal.
Such perspectives stand in sharp contrast to the narratives pushed by large tech corporations, which often frame social and political problems as issues to be solved through new products. APC members instead emphasise that many current crises, from inequality to authoritarianism to climate collapse, are fundamentally political problems that cannot be resolved through engineering alone.
Transforming digital ecosystems
Critically, it is important to remember that these alternatives are not theoretical. APC’s monthly interview series “Building a Free Internet of the Future” has been highlighting several experiences supported by the NGI Zero (NGI0) grants on free software, open data, open hardware and open standards projects. In them, we discovered an alternative to YouTube; an open source software in healthcare; a free software to self-organising and local communities; on extending the life of consumer electronics, and much more.
Also across the Majority World in particular, communities have already built infrastructures rooted in cooperation, free software and collective values, and within the APC network, members have long collaborated to share secure and open tools tailored to lived realities. The Local Networks initiative points out that while the wires, towers and solar panels of community-centred connectivity initiatives (CCCIs) provide the “how” of connectivity, it is the local services that provide the "'why”' for being connected, moving the dial from simple access to meaningful connectivity. Recently African community networks mapped out the need for services related to safe communications, localised finance and commerce, among others.
These infrastructures may not match big tech companies in terms of scale and marketing budgets, but they operate according to integrally different values: they prioritise trust, transparency and accountability to the communities they serve.
For many human rights defenders and civil society organisations, this distinction is critical. Choosing where conversations, documents, strategies or personal communications are hosted can directly affect safety and freedom of expression.
At the same time, there are real and ongoing challenges to sustaining alternative infrastructures. Much of the work that is required to set up and maintain community-based tech projects is underfunded, particularly in increasingly precarious political environments and rising conflict across the globe. Practically speaking, building ethical and autonomous systems requires sustainable funding and collective commitment.
This is one reason why many APC members reject simplistic narratives of individual consumer choice. The responsibility for transforming digital ecosystems cannot rest solely on individuals making better purchasing decisions. Governments, funders, social movements and indeed the tech sector all have their roles to play in supporting public-interest infrastructures. Without multistakeholder commitment we will continue to spin our wheels or, even more worryingly, regress in our pursuit of digital justice.
This piece offers highlights of some of the important work done by APC members. Many organisations within the APC network offer ethical and sustainable service options and we invite readers to browse them below.
- Código Sur (Costa Rica): Código Sur offers free and secure technological services to organisations, movements and collectives that promote human rights, ecology, communications, technology, individual and collective freedoms and social processes of emancipation.
- Colnodo (Colombia): Colnodo is an association of non-profit non-governmental organisations founded in 1994. Its goal is to facilitate communication and the exchange of information and experiences among Colombian social organisations at the local, national and international level through low-cost electronic networks.
- EngageMedia (Indonesia): EngageMedia aims to demystify and provide access to new video distribution technologies, to create an online archive of independent video productions using open content licences, and to form a peer network of video makers, educators and screening organisations.
- eQualitie (Canada): eQualitie's goal is to create accessible technology and improve the skill set needed for defending human rights and freedoms in the digital age. The team has developed tools and services including Deflect for protecting websites from digital attacks, Censorship.no for circumventing internet censorship, and (n+1)sec for securing multiparty chat communications.
- guifi.net (Catalunya): guifi.net is a bottom-up, citizen-driven technological, social and economic project with the objective of creating a free, open and neutral telecommunications network. It is both an NGO and a registered telecommunications operator under Spanish regulations.
- LaLibre.net Tecnologías Comunitarias (Ecuador): LaLibre.net Tecnologías Comunitarias is a collective non-profit project founded in 2014 to provide accessible IT infrastructure to human rights and environmental defenders and social movements that fight for social justice and equality. It is based in Ecuador but provides software and assistance to a diversity of organisations in other countries.
- Progressive Technology Project (United States): Progressive Technology Project (PTP) is organising resistance to oppressive corporate technologies through political education, movement building, and creating people-controlled technology that serves the needs of community organisations
Are you a member with services to share? Write to us at communications@apc.org and we will add it to the list.