But this here is already a prior problem - you depend on these US companies in the first place.
The EU could easily make it free to have a homepage associated for no cost. That would be something. Everyone gets a homepage for free, say, one business per EU citizen. Why is the system screwing us over to depend on US companies here?
the benefit to the business is not that they have a homepage. its that facebook/instagram bring hundreds of thousands of eyes to the page that otherwise would not see it.
The only way I've seen around the impenetrable US social media network effects is to isolate your people either through restricting access or naturally occurring low bilingualism.
The western world speaks English online, so the latter is unlikely to happen and the former would be a final admission that our cultural values mean nothing in practice.
Not really? The upstream problem is getting customers, and the concrete problem is that these humongous American advertising agencies are too big to care about customer services for their smallest clients.
Switching to a EU administrated advertising agency is not obviously better, because that's another big organisation but with even less ties to the local level. The one upside is that a EU level organisation can be legally compelled to fix problems, but even then don't expect it to happen quickly.
How would an EU organization have less ties to EU businesses than a US corporation that has already demonstrated that it doesn’t care about small EU businesses?
I don't know if you work in HR but if you compare Canada and US taxes Canadian taxes are clearly higher... but when you look at cost of hiring the multiplier companies pay to provide a given level of effective income to employees it is far lower in Canada. While the taxes we see are higher, the taxes the US invisibly foists on individuals end up adding up to a much larger number (as well as the US engaging extensively in employer-side taxation which "hides" the tax bill).
It wouldn't hurt, either, to tone down the hyperbole.
Everytime I’ve gotten actual numbers from people the total tax burden has been roughly equivalent between the US and the EU, but people confuse the different buckets it comes from as the EU has taxes like VAT and the US will be split between federal,state,local,property,sales, etc
(Not that I think it's a good suggestion, but this is a bad reason not to do it).
Especially since it might not work. Right now everyone (unfortunately) is on existing networks and if you're a business that's what matters.