I don't think that's feasible either on a large scale. How about this strategy:

1. Pick the top three offenders (not in the same industry).

2. For each offender, find their cash cow, or top 3 most profitable products.

3. Make a concerted effort to boycott those products, and those products alone, indefinitely. Make some real damage.

The purpose here is to make an example out of someone. Build morale among protesters that if well organized, they can be effective.

First scenario: One million US/Canadian citizens sporadically decide to buy from company Y instead of company X... nobody notices.

Second scenario: Company Z suddenly loses 100,000 customers for their core product... I'll bet you someone notices.

Yes, see the history of fossil fuel divestment and boycotts, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel_divestment

isn't that what we already do? I mean, I switched from Godaddy to Namecheap, Dropbox to Spideroak, etc. How is this not how things are done today?

SpiderOak isn't "better" than DropBox. It supports privacy but the service and support is utterly appalling.

I was getting upload speeds on the order of kilobytes per second on a gigabit fiber connection while my CPU was idling. Filed a support request and they bumbled around a bit and then ceased responding to me entirely until I opened another ticket and demanded a refund. It took 5 __months__ to get to this point, with them not responding for weeks at a time.

I'd recommend something like https://www.syncany.org/ over SpiderOak any day.

Depending on your needs, you could try Syncthing [1].

IMO the major functional differences between it and Dropbox are:

* You have to provide the servers that Dropbox provides. I.E. you have to provide the level of availability that you want. [2]

* FOSS licensed.

* Because your data is only ever stored on your machines, you are only limited by your own storage and bandwidth.

[1] https://syncthing.net/

[2] This requirement has actually loosened to some degree because the latest version of Syncthing introduced relay servers. So you still need to provide available storage servers, but you can use relays to overcome partitions in your network.

The first requirement is the one that kills SyncThing for me and why Syncany is more appealing.

To sum up my reasons very quickly:

- I want to store my data offsite, where it isn't vulnerable to breakins, fire, water damage etc.

- I have no offsite storage I can trust completely.

- Syncthing only supports storing plaintext on disk.

Therefore I can't use syncthing to securely and remotely store data.

This is where Syncany wins. You don't have to trust the storage endpoint.

Also, Syncthing requires having a CPU attached to your remote storage, meaning your remote options are limited to a VPS or dedicated server. This is significantly more expensive than buying block storage from Google or Amazon.

If Syncthing ever resolves https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing/issues/109 I'll be open to using it, until then it's out.

Yeah sure: but Syncthing is like Dropbox, and Syncany is like Backblaze. They're different products.

How so? Syncany syncs files/directories, Syncthing syncs files/directories and Dropbox syncs files/directories.