At least Cloudflare has no network effects. They offer good services that I can migrate off of if I need to. Google owns my life and it's really hard to go elsewhere, even if I want to.
It’s not that difficult to migrate from Google, there are plenty of good alternatives in every area. You just will probably not find everything integrated into one system, and you might have to pay for parts (but that’s OK, as you’re no longer the product). The trick is to start with the easy areas and gradually migrate bit by bit.
The essentials for me are private email, calendar & cloud storage. Here is my post-Google setup:
https://tuta.com/ is a German privacy-focused alternative that I'm currently using for email & calendar. Easy switch, although I was already using web clients rather than IMAP before the switch.
I settled on a 5€ / month VPS from Hetzner and using Syncthing instead, but this requires some minimal amount of technical skills to set up and maintain.
There is no alternative to YouTube, unfortunately.
Right, yes, YouTube is the big outlier. After I’d deleted my old Google account I created a new YouTube-specific account, and run it in a Firefox container to keep me logged out everywhere else.
if cloudflare flags your IP/VPN/fingerprint/useragent/haircut good luck accessing 60% of the internet. their invisible turnstyles and captchas are everywhere
