France’s move this week to push millions of state workers to use a homegrown alternative to Zoom and Microsoft Teams marks the latest chapter in a decades-long effort by European governments to wean themselves off US Big Tech.
France’s Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu sent a letter to ministries on Thursday ordering them to shift their video calls to Visio, an internally developed Zoom alternative, by the end of the year.
“To guarantee the security, confidentiality and resilience of public electronic communications, it is therefore imperative to deploy a unified videoconferencing solution, controlled by the State, based on sovereign technologies,” he wrote.
The same logic was evident on Friday, when the French government blocked satellite operator Eutelsat from selling its ground antenna business to private equity firm EQT, citing the group’s strategic nature as a rival to Elon Musk’s Starlink internet service.
Despite long-standing struggles to persuade Europeans to switch from the likes of Microsoft, Google and Amazon to local options, renewed concern about US President Donald Trump’s foreign policy has brought new urgency to calls for a so-called “tech decoupling”.
That has fuelled fresh efforts by European governments to spur local alternatives from communications apps and cloud providers to satellites and artificial intelligence.
This week’s French moves came just days after the European parliament passed a resolution calling on member states to “strengthen European technological sovereignty by facilitating the procurement of European digital products and services, where possible”.
The EU still relies on non-EU countries — primarily the US — for more than 80 per cent of its digital services and infrastructure, according to the parliament’s report.
For decades, efforts to create European versions of cloud computing, messaging and enterprise software have foundered because people and companies are loath to switch over to often inferior or inconvenient alternatives.
The small number of successful examples has largely been piecemeal. In October, for instance, the German state of Schleswig-Holstein celebrated a “milestone for digital sovereignty” with the migration of some 40,000 state workers’ email mailboxes from Microsoft Exchange and Outlook to open-source alternatives.
France’s President Emmanuel Macron has been one of the most prominent advocates for Europe to become more independent from the US on everything from technology to weapons systems.
He has championed local cloud-computing providers as well as Paris-based artificial intelligence company Mistral, seen as one of Europe’s few bulwarks against US and Chinese dominance of AI.
Now, Trump’s threats to invade Greenland, which is part of Denmark, have raised the spectre of a trade war in which Europe’s reliance on Silicon Valley could prove a big economic liability.
“What has changed today, more than the nature of the problem, is the likelihood that it could materialise abruptly: extraterritorial sanctions, access restrictions, regulatory blackmail,” said Francesca Musiani, a research director at France’s National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS).
“In that context, decoupling stops being a theoretical hypothesis and becomes a risk-management scenario.”
France itself has a chequered history of failed state-backed technology initiatives that were announced with great fanfare by presidents from Jacques Chirac to Macron, only for them to prove to be a waste of public money and time.
In 2008, France and Germany poured hundreds of millions of euro into developing Quaero — a locally made search engine billed as a sovereign alternative to Google and Yahoo — then closed it after five years. Google’s market share in search in Europe still stands at about 90 per cent.
Then, Paris tried to spur the development of a “sovereign cloud” by backing two competing projects led by telecoms groups Orange and SFR, arguing that the US cloud providers could not ensure that French user data stayed in Europe and was not vulnerable to US law enforcement or spying.
Again, uptake was minimal since the services were not as good, so the government instead regulated changes to try to make US and other foreign products more secure for the public sector and companies.
Saul Klein, London-based tech investor at Phoenix Court, said countries should be working together to ensure Europe has strong players in the industry’s next frontiers, citing Dutch chip equipment giant ASML’s €1.3bn investment in Mistral last year.
“I don’t see the point of a French Zoom,” he said. “It’s unlikely for any sovereign state to be able to do something on their own that will compete scientifically or technologically against an American or Chinese alternative . . . One has to fight the next set of battles.”
According to the research firm IDC, European companies still spent about 80 per cent of their total $25bn investments on cloud computing infrastructure in 2024 at the top five US cloud providers, which have themselves made deeper commitments to store European data locally.
David Amiel, France’s junior minister for the civil service, told the FT that the country would not be able to reach President Macron’s goals of “strategic autonomy” — meaning reducing dependencies across the economy — without a renewed push for European companies to provide more of its technology.
“We must wean ourselves off our addiction to non-European tools,” he said. “But they must be up to the best quality standards, otherwise they will fail.”
The Visio project piloted by Amiel’s ministry has the long-term goal of creating more tools for the public sector that eventually could replace Microsoft Office or Google Suite.
Last year, it launched an internal secure-messaging app called Tchap that now has about 300,000 users and aims to supplant WhatsApp or Signal.
Amiel said some applications would be done in partnership with European tech companies so the government would not develop only on its own.
A military official told the FT. “If we want to become more independent, we need to do this even if it’s not convenient at first,” the person said.
Another staffer was more critical: “I hate Tchap and already have enough apps to check!”
