Can you use the internet well? Not in the sense of being good at it – we know you can do that, because you’re reading this article, which is a good thing to being doing with your internet connection. But is there an ethical way to be online?

That question is whispered every time anyone logs on, but it got louder this week, amid the ongoing outrage at the behaviour of ICE in the US and the Trump government more generally. In the wake of that – and amid a range of other responses – many people have attempted to detach their internet use from those companies that help power ICE and its related organisations.

So, for instance, a viral post from a campaign calling itself QuitGPT has gained nearly 200,000 likes since it was posted five days ago. “We are launching an INTERNATIONAL BOYCOTT of ChatGPT for financing Trump and giving tech to ICE,” it reads. The criticism relates primarily to Greg Brockman, a cofounder and president of ChatGPT creators OpenAI, who donated $25 million to the main pro-Trump SuperPAC.

It’s just one part of a broader movement. NYU professor and talking head Scott Galloway has for instance launched a movement called “Resist and Unsubscribe”, which points its ire at ten companies, including OpenAI. It also asks people to stop using Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Netflix, Paramount+, Uber, and X. All of those companies are “subscription-driven consumer tech companies we have identified as having outsized influence over the national economy and our president”, Galloway writes on a devoted page set up for the campaign. (It also targets other companies – AT&T, Comcast, Charter Communications, Dell, FedEx, Home Depot, Marriott and UPS as “active enablers of ICE”, most of which focuses on contracts for services to the US government.)

The list is long: without it you’d have very little of the modern web left. Even Galloway recognised that: the same website says that “we’d boycott Instagram too if we could, but we need it to get this message to you”. Even those leading the charge on a boycott are admitting that it isn’t possible to commit to it fully.

The truth is even more complicated. It might be relatively easy to unsubscribe from Amazon Prime, for instance – but it’s very difficult to even know when you’re using Amazon Web Services, from which it makes most of its money. The same is true of similar offerings from Google and Microsoft.

The last few months have revealed the hidden systems that power our internet, as if the scenery has suddenly fallen and we can see the stagehands behind. For the most part, this has been in fittingly disastrous ways: the recent outages at Cloudflare and Amazon Web Services exposed how centralised the web is through demonstrating its fragility. Websites that had no ostensible connection to each other all went down at the same time – because, in fact, they were all depending on the same relatively small number of systems and providers.

Every time there is a flare-up of this kind of consumer activism, it is a reminder that all of these companies are not stable, static, permanent parts of our infrastructure, but rather contingent companies run by human beings who really do need us to keep subscribing to keep their businesses afloat. This might be one way of starting to use the web in an ethical way: to pull down the scenery, and expose the people and companies behind it.

Those people and companies have unprecedented and sometimes infinite-feeling power. But at least some part of that power is derived from seeming both inevitable and semi-transparent; just there, in the same way that a water tower might be. But they are making choices every day, empowered by the importance and money gathered from their customers; those customers, it seems, are becoming increasingly frustrated with those choices.