Big Tech companies have several advantages that help them to keep their monopolies: sometimes the lack of valid alternatives, financial firepower to market their solutions on tv (no big tech started without massive tv campaigns to establish their clients base), accustomization of users to their products or legacies, lack of expertise of the user which is more confused by the proliferation of alternatives instead of being helped so that they prefer to stick to what is already known. However Freedom belongs only to the people who strived for it not to rent seekers. There are several alternative browsers but to make it simpler our selection encompass only those based on the Gecko and Goanna layout engine because all the other browser engines have been developed by the notorius big tech companies (you don't want to exit the door to be back by the window) :

GNU IceCat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_IceCat

W3M (text based+images): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W3m

Lynx (text based): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)

Comodo IceDragon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comodo_IceDragon

K-Meleon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-Meleon

SeaMonkey: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeaMonkey

Basilisk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilisk_(web_browser)

Pale Moon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Moon_(web_browser)

Mozilla Firefox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox

Disconneting yourself from the Matrix and getting rid of the old bad surfing habits helps to build a free internet and a better world while you better protect your privacy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecko_(software)

https://www.webdevelopersnotes.com/browsers-list

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_browsers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers

Yacy: https://yacy.net/ (peer to peer, decentralized, cross-jurisdictional)

Peekier: https://peekier.com/ ( unknown jurisdiction)

Gigablast: https://gigablast.com (US jurisdiction)

Mojeek: https://mojeek.com (UK's jurisdiction)

Istella: https://www.istella.it/ (Italy's jurisdiction)

SecretLab: https://www.secretsearchenginelabs.com/ (Finland's jurisdiction)

EntireWeb: https://www.entireweb.com/ (Sweden's jurisdiction)

Goo: https://goo.ne.jp (Japan's jurisdiction)

Naver: https://naver.com (South Korea jurisdiction)

Seznam: https://www.seznam.cz/ (Check Republic's jurisdiction)

Fireball: https://fireball.de/ (Germany's jurisdiction)

MillionShort: https://millionshort.com (Canada's jurisdiction)

Content editors nowdays have two options: create their own website/portal or to host their content on a big tech platform. The benefit of these platforms is that the editor can focus in producing the content without caring too much about the infrastructure needed to host it and that usually these services are provided for free trough advertisement at the expense of your privacy. Your data when not directly sold to third parties are used to build better targeted advertisement. Also your data can be obtained by governments through deliberate sharing or warrants or forcefully through other methods. Content editors struggle to gain visibility inside these platform to reach their intended public and can be shut down any time by caprice of the platform owners.

Hosting your content directly, better if on your own server, is the best option not to be subject to big tech monopolistic policies leaning toward their best interests and  associated power lobbies one.  The disadvantage of hosting your content is that it is not going to be visible if your public does not search for it. Most of the public consume information passively because it is surrounded by big tech sources. You are under siege without being aware of it. Your five senses are bombed and saturated by competing signals to saturate your brain processing capacity so that no other signals can pass. Your mind is also filtering the overflow of information to cope with it.

The only way to prevent to overload your brain with garbage is to select your favourite sources so that most of the signals you receive are potentially useful or at least of interest information.

Finding your sources requires active search and the search in the digital era requires search engines. Having Google the monopoly of internet searches and since Google manipulates results of the searches, any building of a free, non Big-Brother internet starts with using a really neutral and good search engine.

The only really big tech independent search engine is Yacy because it is peer to peer and that makes it jurisdiction free and has the resilience of a network. The internet itself was born on the principle that in order to survive to shut down attempts it had to be decentralized. Yacy: https://yacy.net/

The other alternative search engines currently available are Gigablast and Mojeek, the only ones that really crawl the internet. While they have more documents indexed they are not decentralized and subject to unfavourable jurisdictions that not only makes them vulnarable but their are subject to the same jurisdiction to which big tech belongs.

We are not citing other search engines because they are meta search engines. That means they do not crawl the internet to index it but provide a collection of aggregated results from other big tech search engines.

We are just mentioning big tech search engines subject to a competitor's jurisdiction like Yandex ( Russia jurisdiction) and Baidu (China jurisdiction). They do not provide any advantage in terms of privacy and freedom but they might provide results filtered or manipulated in a different way from US jurisdiction. That might make them useful in particular circumstances.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Internet_search_engines

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines