We had a website, that's besides the point. You want to be where people already are, which for American tourists, will be American social media. It's not a choice between "be on social media and survive, or don't", it's "reach the audience you're trying to reach or don't", not a matter of survival.

>The EU could easily make it free to have a homepage associated for no cost.

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.

That won't change 20-30% of their customers using Facebook/Instagram to find them.

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.

> But this here is already a prior problem - you depend on these US companies in the first place.

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.

the website would still depend on google to be found by most people.

Do people in the EU want to see their tax money used for that purpose rather than other far more pressing needs such as healthcare? I really doubt it.