In debt to Big Tech?

This week, something happened that you don't see very often. MPs stood up in Westminster Hall and said, out loud, what many of us have been thinking for a while.

On Tuesday, Peter Fortune MP opened a debate on government support for UK-based tech companies. The numbers he quoted were stark. Apple and Google control 95% of all mobile operating systems in the UK. AWS and Microsoft hold 70-90% of the UK cloud market. The CMA has the legal powers to act. It just hasn't used them yet.

The debate referenced three global cloud outages in quick succession, the CrowdStrike incident that cost the UK economy up to 2.3 billion pounds, and the basic absurdity that Spotify cannot tell its own customers what a subscription costs inside its own app.

The message was clear. Digital dependency is an economic risk, not just a philosophical concern. And competition, not regulation, is the answer.

That is exactly why hashtag#alternativesInUK exists. Not to rage against Big Tech, but to quietly point out that British companies are already building real alternatives. Good ones. They just need customers brave enough to try them.