How Far Can You Really Move Away from Big Tech? We’re Putting It to the Test

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How dependent is your business on technology you don’t control?

It’s an easy question to ignore while everything works. Your staff open Windows. Outlook loads. Teams connects. Your cloud storage is there. The AI tool you’ve wired into your workflow answers when you ask it something. Hunky dory. 

Then something changes.

In June 2026, the US government ordered Anthropic to restrict access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 AI models for foreign nationals. The directive landed at 5:21pm ET and took effect immediately. With no reliable way to check nationality on the spot, Anthropic suspended both models for everyone.

Access came back within weeks. But for Operum founder Tom, the episode sharpened a question he’d already been chewing on:

What happens when a technology your business depends on suddenly isn’t available to you?

That’s the starting point for Beyond Big Tech, a new podcast about digital sovereignty from Tom and his co-host Wojtek, and an experiment Tom is running on his own working life.

The aim isn’t to declare war on Microsoft, Google or Apple. It’s to find out how much choice we actually have…

Digital Sovereignty vs. Reality: Can European Tech Actually Deliver?

Digital sovereignty isn’t technological isolation

“Digital sovereignty” can make the whole subject sound rather grand. For an SME, the useful version is simpler: can you make meaningful choices about the technology your business runs on?

That means knowing where your important data sits, which companies control the infrastructure underneath your systems, which jurisdiction those companies answer to, how much of your business leans on a handful of vendors, and what happens if their prices, terms or access change.

Total independence isn’t the target, and never will be. Even supposedly independent products rely on processors, operating systems, cloud infrastructure, identity providers, app stores and networking from somewhere. The better question is whether you’ve boxed yourself into a position where one provider can change the rules and you’ve little practical choice but to accept them.

The Fable 5 incident made the risk feel real

Wojtek had been testing Fable 5 not long after its release. He was impressed enough to build a software demo for a potential investor with it, despite not being a developer himself.

Then access disappeared.

On 12 June, Anthropic announced that a US export-control directive required it to suspend Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for foreign nationals. It restored access on 1 July, once the controls were lifted, with Fable 5 available globally again.

If you’d spent months building an internal process around one model, trained your staff on it and wired it into your other workflows, even a temporary outage becomes your problem remarkably fast. 

The more useful a tool is, the more it hurts to lose. And AI is the tool businesses are now embedding deepest into everyday work.

Switching gets painful long before anyone bans anything

Government intervention is the dramatic version. There’s a far more mundane one: price.

Tom described a case where Operum ran a piece of software across roughly 2,000 machines. Over time, the supplier put the price up by more than 1,000%.

Why tolerate that? Because replacing software across 2,000 endpoints isn’t like cancelling Netflix. Operum would have had to reach every machine, strip out the old product, deploy the replacement and mop up everything that broke on the way. 

Eventually the increase got too big to swallow. The company ran two products in parallel, paid both suppliers for a while, and moved off the original.

That’s vendor lock-in in the real world. Nobody physically stops you leaving. They just make leaving expensive, disruptive or technically awkward enough that staying becomes the easier option.

UK regulators have noticed. The Competition and Markets Authority found that technical and commercial barriers make it harder for cloud customers to switch providers or use several at once, and in March 2026 it announced further action on interoperability and the fees firms face when moving data out of cloud platforms. 

Sovereignty and lock-in are the same business conversation.

A different logo doesn’t make you independent

Swapping Microsoft for another vendor doesn’t automatically fix anything. Nor does trading an iPhone for a different manufacturer’s phone. The dependency sits in layers:

Hardware → operating system → applications → cloud → identity → data

Change one layer and the others often stay exactly where they were. 

Take cloud infrastructure. European providers hold around 15% of the European market; Amazon, Microsoft and Google together hold roughly 70%. In the UK, Ofcom found AWS and Microsoft alone accounted for 70 to 80% of cloud infrastructure revenues, with Google next.

That heavy concentration is worth understanding, even if AWS or Azure remain the right call for your business. 

It’s also why Tom isn’t just hunting for a European badge to slap on every US product he uses. He’s mapping where Big Tech shows up across his personal and business life, then trying alternatives to see what actually holds up. Some will be European. Some will come from smaller providers elsewhere. 

The real test is what happens when you have to live with them.

Sovereignty shouldn’t become a purity test

It’s easy for this subject to turn ideological. Our test is deliberately duller.

• Is it as good? If an alternative can’t do the job properly, that’s a problem. Tom still has customers to support. He can’t tell someone their work is three hours late because his experiment in independence didn’t go to plan.
• Is it practical to use? A technically impressive product is no use to an SME if deploying it needs a specialist team and three weeks of configuration. Switching cost matters as much as the subscription price.
• Can we depend on it? Smaller providers bring their own risks. Will the company still exist in five years? Is support good enough? Can it handle growth? Choosing the smaller name just because it’s smaller isn’t risk management.

And one more question SMEs tend to forget:

• How hard would it be to leave again? Everyone examines implementation. Far fewer examine the exit.

Start with the dependencies that could actually hurt

Start with consequence. What would genuinely hurt if it vanished, doubled in price or became hard to reach? For most SMEs, that means looking closely at:

Business-critical data

Where is it stored? Can you export it in a usable format? Is there another copy, and how long would restoration take if the original system went down?

Identity and accounts

Most businesses use a single identity provider to unlock email, documents and applications. Convenient, and precisely why that infrastructure matters so much.

Email

If your email platform disappeared tomorrow, how much of the business would stop with it? Think past sending messages: calendars, contacts, authentication emails, customer history, connected apps.

Backups

A backup that runs on the same system, credentials and provider as the thing it’s backing up may give you less independence than you think.

Cloud infrastructure

What would moving actually involve? Interoperability, data-transfer costs and licensing can all make switching major platforms genuinely hard.

AI

The dependency businesses are building fastest. Before an AI system becomes essential to a process, ask what happens if the model changes, the price doubles or access disappears. Could another model step in? Could you recover your prompts, data and workflows?

Endpoint devices

Phones, laptops and operating systems are the visible end of a long supply chain. Worth examining, but changing the badge on the laptop while every critical service stays tied to one provider won’t move the needle.

We’re testing this because theory only gets you so far

Tom’s hardly anti-Big Tech. He’s spent three decades using and recommending kit from the likes of Microsoft and Apple, which is what makes the experiment interesting.

Over the coming months, he and Wojtek will test European and independent alternatives wherever Big Tech turns up in daily work. Some will be excellent. Some will be irritating. Some will get abandoned after a week. That’s useful information too.

Replacing everything isn’t the point. Tom just wants a position where a supplier changing its price, its terms or your access can’t force the answer:

“We don’t have another option.”

Follow Beyond Big Tech: A Founder’s Journey to Digital Sovereignty, where Tom and Wojtek try the alternatives and report back on what survives contact with a real business.