Report from ZDNET
In Brief – French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu has directed all French government officials and civil servants to stop using American-owned video conference software such as Teams and Zoom by 2027 in favor of a new French-made application called Visio. The policy is part of France’s “digital sovereignty” strategy to reduce reliance on foreign software providers and gain greater control over critical digital infrastructure. Visio, in testing for a year and currently with about 40,000 users, is part of France’s “Suite Numérique,” a sovereign digital ecosystem designed to replace tools such as Gmail and Slack for civil servants. The video conference application includes AI-powered meeting transcription and speaker identification developed by a French startup and is hosted on Outscale’s sovereign cloud infrastructure. Officials claim the switch could save up to €1 million annually per 100,000 users, while improving security, confidentiality, and resilience. Last July, the French Government instructed its officials to start using a government-designed messaging app, called “Tchap,” instead of foreign-owned messaging apps.
Context – The huge disruptions in US-EU relations that marked the entire first year of the second Trump presidency boosted European “digital sovereignty” efforts and the rapid escalation of January’s Greenland crisis put an exclamation point on those concerns. In March, nearly 100 European companies and trade groups signed a letter called on the EU Commission to take “radical action” for Europe to become more technologically independent. The year closed with France and Germany co-hosting a Summit on European Digital Sovereignty where French President Emmanuel Macron said that Europe must not be a “client” of outside tech providers or a “vassal” to the US or China. The Eurostack Initiative details actions to promote European offerings across the digital ecosystem, including chips, computing, applications, and AI. Meanwhile, taxes and regulatory limits on US tech companies will likely impact European business and consumer customers of successful digital services by imposing higher costs or degrading services.