France is taking a fresh step to reduce its reliance on US Big Tech by urging millions of public sector employees to replace Zoom and Microsoft Teams with a domestically developed alternative. According to the Financial Times, the move reflects a long-standing European effort to strengthen technological sovereignty.
French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu sent a letter to ministries on Thursday, instructing them to switch video calls to Visio, a state-controlled videoconferencing platform, by the end of the year. “To ensure the security, confidentiality and resilience of public electronic communications, it is imperative to deploy a state-controlled videoconferencing solution based on sovereign technologies,” he wrote.
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The decision fits into a broader strategy to limit dependence on non-European providers for critical infrastructure. The same rationale was cited when the French government blocked satellite operator Eutelsat from selling ground antenna assets to private equity firm EQT, citing the group’s strategic role as a rival to Starlink.
Digital sovereignty gains urgency across Europe
France’s move comes days after the European Parliament called on member states to prioritize European digital products and services. The EU still relies on non-EU countries—mainly the US—for more than 80% of its digital services and infrastructure.
Despite decades of attempts to build European alternatives to Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, adoption has often lagged due to weaker performance or limited usability. Success stories remain rare, such as Germany’s Schleswig-Holstein state migrating tens of thousands of public email accounts to open-source solutions.
President Emmanuel Macron has been a vocal advocate for greater European independence from the US in technology, backing local cloud providers and AI companies such as Mistral. Recent geopolitical tensions, including statements by Donald Trump, have added urgency to calls for technological “decoupling.”
France’s track record with state-backed tech initiatives is mixed. High-profile projects like the Quaero search engine or sovereign cloud efforts failed to gain traction, leaving Google with roughly a 90% share of Europe’s search market. Whether Visio can avoid a similar fate and compete effectively with established platforms remains an open question.
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