If I wanted to show my distaste for the direction the US is going by boycotting American PC hardware, software and services, could it be done? Ian

You could certainly eliminate a lot of American products, but you might be giving up features without getting any ethical benefits. For example, more than a billion people already manage without a lot of American technology because they live in China or Russia. While I share your distaste for the Trump regime, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are not exactly choirboys.



And while Trump is scapegoating immigrants, more than half of America’s top technology companies were co-founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants. Do you really want to punish them for Trump’s misdeeds?

It’s also important to remember that the US is a big place and most Americans don’t like Trump either. Most technology products come from companies based in California (Apple, Facebook, Google, HP, Intel etc) or the state of Washington (Amazon, Microsoft). Both voted against Trump by substantial margins.

Countries retaliating against American tariffs are targeting products from states that support Trump. For example, China’s list includes soybeans while the EU’s includes Harley-Davidson motorcycles, Levi’s jeans and bourbon whiskey.

Instead of boycotting technology products, boycott things from “red states”. The Financial Times suggests peanut butter, for example.

Hardware

Most hardware is made in China, mostly by Taiwanese companies. Whichever brand of PC you buy, it was probably built by Quanta, Compal, Pegatron, Wistron, Inventec or Foxconn. Apple and HP are from California while Dell is from Texas. Asus and Acer are based in Taiwan. Lenovo is Chinese.

Better still, you could buy a PC assembled in the UK from a company such as Zoostorm or Chillblast, though most of the parts are still manufactured in China.

Intel microprocessors are American, but the company also makes them in Ireland and Israel, and it has several factories in China. Intel’s main rival, AMD, is American, but some of its manufacturing is done by TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor) or Korea’s Samsung.

Perhaps you could buy devices with ARM processors. That’s a British design – originally spun out of Acorn, which made the BBC Microcomputer – though Japan’s SoftBank bought the company in 2016.

Software

It’s hard to avoid American operating systems: Microsoft Windows, Apple’s MacOS and Google’s Android are all American products. The BSD version of Unix, on which MacOS is based, is from the University of California at Berkeley.

While GNU/Linux is mostly American, at least the kernel was started by Linus Torvalds in Finland, though he moved to the US decades ago and is now a US citizen. Happily, there are some non-American Linux distributions such as Canonical’s Ubuntu. Canonical was founded and bankrolled by a South African, Mark Shuttleworth, and is based in London. However, Ubuntu is based on Debian Linux, which is American.

SUSE Linux was developed in Germany (Software und System-Entwicklung), taken over by Novell (American) and later sold to Micro Focus (British). It’s now being sold to EQT, a Swedish private equity group. However, it’s an enterprise not a consumer version of Linux.

Microsoft Office is obviously American, but LibreOffice has a European connection, even if little (if any) of the original code has survived. StarWriter started in Germany in the 1980s and appeared on some Amstrad computers. Sun Microsystems (American) bought Star Division in 1999, and the following year, made the code of StarOffice open source. This led to OpenOffice, which was awful. In 2011, OO was forked to create LibreOffice, which is better.

Linus Torvalds, the Finnish founder of the Linux operating system, in 2000. Photograph: Paul Sakuma/AP

Kingsoft’s WPS Office is another alternative. Kingsoft is a Chinese company that offers free (with adverts), subscription ($29.99/year) and paid-for ($79.99) versions of a three-piece office suite that apes the Microsoft version.

You can also use Opera or Vivaldi, which are excellent browsers. Both were co-founded in Norway by Iceland-born Jon von Tetzchner, though Opera is now owned by a Chinese consortium. But like many alternative browsers, both Opera and Vivaldi are based on Google’s Chromium open-source code.

Services

You can certainly switch to a non-American email service. For example, you could use GMX Mail, which is German, or Fastmail, which has its headquarters in Australia. Here WeGo does great maps. It was developed by Nokia, based on its takeover of America’s Navteq, and is now run from Amsterdam. Spotify music streaming is an easy option: it was developed in Sweden.



For messaging, you could use Viber, which was developed in Israel and is now run by Rakuten Viber in Luxembourg. The parent company is Japanese. An alternative is Line, which is run by a Japanese subsidiary of a South Korean internet company. For those with long memories, ICQ is still going. It was developed in Israel, sold to AOL in the US, and is now owned by the Russian internet giant, Mail.Ru.

You could try to replace Google search with the privacy-oriented StartPage. This was developed in New York as Ixquick then bought by a Dutch company. However, StartPage gets its results from Google. Alternatively, you could try Yandex, Qwant or Swisscows. Yandex is a Russian multi-national listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange. Qwant is French and, as you guessed, Swisscows is from Confœderatio Helvetica (CH). Both use Microsoft’s Bing for many searches, though von Tetzchner says Qwant is “the first European search engine that is building its own web indexing technology”.

Social networking is a harder nut to crack. You could use Vkontakte, which is Russian and also owned by Mail.Ru. You could use Taringa!, which was launched in Argentina and is popular in the Spanish-speaking world. You’d have plenty of options if you spoke Chinese.

The real problem is that even if you got past the language barriers, it’s unlikely that your friends and family haunt any of these social networks. They’re on Facebook and/or Instagram.

China does it

Behind the Great Firewall, Chinese companies have cloned or improved on American offerings. There are now three Chinese suppliers in the world’s top ten internet companies, with Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent being roughly equivalent to Google, Amazon and Facebook respectively. Their combined market capitalisation is approaching $1 trillion. However, they have relatively few users in the USA and Europe, except for Chinese students and tourists.

If you spoke Chinese, Baidu could replace Google. As well as running the world’s second largest search engine, Baidu offers a browser and toolbar, maps, a cloud service, a social network (Baidu Space), music streaming and many other services. It also has a virtual assistant (Baidu Duer) and a self-driving car project.

Alibaba is the equivalent of Amazon, eBay, and PayPal. It has two huge online marketplaces, Taobao and Tmall, plus AliExpress for international users. It also operates a payment service (AliPay), email, messaging, cloud and many other services.

Tencent is a giant conglomerate that started with an ICQ-style messaging service (QQ) and now runs WeChat, which is China’s do-everything app. Its offerings include a Twitter-equivalent (Tencent Weibo), a social network (Qzone), a search engine and a browser, a digital payment service (Tenpay), an online bank (WeBank), and China’s biggest music streaming service. Its gaming businesses include WeGame, League of Legends, and a home games console that also runs Windows 10.

Unusually, Tencent offers QQ International for international users. You can also download WeChat apps for Android and Apple smartphones, though recent user reviews suggest it might not be worth the effort. Tencent has some way to go if it’s planning to take over the UK.

Have you got a question? Email it to Ask.Jack@theguardian.com