Paris is pushing “sovereign” tech again, and this time it is aiming it straight at video calls, satellites and cloud habit-forming.
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.
The French government, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu, sent a letter to ministries ordering them to shift their video calls to Visio, an internally developed Zoom alternative, by the end of the year.
Lecornu wrote: “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.”
On Friday, 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 Microsoft, Google, and Amazon to local alternatives, renewed concern about US President Donald Trump’s foreign policy has added 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 to often inferior or inconvenient alternatives.
The small number of successful examples has largely been piecemeal. In October, 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 of the US across areas ranging from technology to weapons systems.
He has championed local cloud-computing providers and the Paris-based artificial intelligence company Mistral, which is seen as one of Europe’s few bulwarks against US and Chinese dominance in AI.
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.
France has a chequered history of failed state-backed technology initiatives announced with great fanfare by presidents from Jacques Chirac to Macron, only to prove 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.
French government, junior minister for the civil service David Amiel 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.
French government, junior minister for the civil service David Amiel said: “We must wean ourselves off our addiction to non-European tools. But they must be up to the best quality standards or they will fail.”
The Visio project piloted by Amiel’s ministry aims to create more tools for the public sector that could eventually replace Microsoft Office or Google Workspace. Last year, it launched an internal secure-messaging app called Tchap, which now has about 300,000 users and aims to replace 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.
