[mikae1]

As a Swede, the Amazon comment is funny.

They came here perhaps two years ago and everybody I know agrees they suck and can not compete with our local alternatives. They're not cheaper and the website is an utter mess of auto translations and dark patterns. Order flash storage and pray it's not counterfeit. We use Prisjakt[1] to compare prices and price history between shops.

About Google... Yes, YouTube is hard for me to avoid. I use StartPage for search (which is Google search proxy just like DDG is a Bing proxy). Switching to DDG wouldn't be that much of a sacrifice. I don't have a Google account and YT works well via RSS. FreshRSS is basically my YT frontend.

Facebook is the hardest to leave, without a doubt. Civil society isn't organized around any of Amazon's or Google's services. Parent group for school? Facebook. A group for your neighborhood? Facebook. Local trading of goods? Facebook marketplace. I've made the data takeout and have been hovering over that account deletion button I don't know how many times... But I don't follow through.

So, I respectfully don't agree. :)

[1] https://www.prisjakt.nu/produkt.php?p=6498581

[ericjmorey]

It took 20+ years for Amazon to supplant the retail infrastructure in the US. They may just be getting started in Sweden.

[mikae1]

Highly (and sadly) likely. They're obviously not in a hurry.

[Yizahi]

I'm reasonably sure that if you will block every single Amazon owned address at your entry firewall, a majority of the apps or sites will stop working for you. That's what is implied by saying that it is not possible to avoid Google, Amazon and either one of the MS or Apple.

[averageRoyalty]

I've never seen anything indicating that AWS does any level of user level tracking of people who access the instrastructure it sells on, have you?

I understand AWS is part of Amazon, but I think in the context of this discussion they're quite fairlt being treated as isolated companies.