France ditches Zoom and Teams for homegrown system amid European digital sovereignty push

LONDON — In France, civil servants will abandon Zoom and Teams in favor of a local videoconferencing system. Soldiers in Austria are using open source office software to write reports after the army abandoned Microsoft Office. German state bureaucrats have also turned to free software for their administrative work.

Across Europe, governments and institutions are looking to reduce their use of digital services from big US tech companies and turn to domestic or free alternatives. The push for “digital sovereignty” is gaining attention as the Trump administration adopts an increasingly hawkish posture toward the continent, highlighted by recent tensions over Greenland that have intensified fears that Silicon Valley giants could be forced to cut off access.

Concerns about data privacy and fears that Europe is not doing enough to keep up with the technological leadership of the United States and China are also fueling this dynamic.

The French government referenced some of these concerns when it announced last week that 2.5 million civil servants would stop using videoconferencing tools from U.S. providers — including Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Webex and GoTo Meeting — by 2027 and switch to Visio, a local service.

The objective is to “put an end to the use of non-European solutions, to guarantee the security and confidentiality of public electronic communications by relying on a powerful and sovereign tool”, specifies the press release.

“We cannot risk seeing our scientific exchanges, our sensitive data and our strategic innovations exposed to non-European actors,” David Amiel, Minister of the Civil Service, said in a statement.

Microsoft said it continues to “work closely with the French government and respect the importance of security, privacy and digital trust for public institutions.”

The company said it “strives to offer customers greater choice, stronger data protection and resilient cloud services – ensuring that data remains in Europe, in accordance with European law, with strong security and privacy protections.”

Zoom, Webex and GoTo Meeting did not respond to requests for comment.

French President Emmanuel Macron has championed digital sovereignty for years. But there is now a lot more “political momentum behind this idea, now that we need to de-risk US technology,” Nick Reiners of the Eurasia Group.

“It’s kind of like there’s a real change in the zeitgeist,” Reiners said.

It was a hot topic at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting of global political and economic elites last month in Davos, Switzerland. Henna Virkkunen, head of technological sovereignty at the European Commission, told an audience that Europe’s dependence on others “can be used as a weapon against us.”

“This is why it is so important that we do not depend on one country or one company when it comes to very critical areas of our economy or society,” she said, without naming countries or companies.

A watershed moment came last year when the Trump administration sanctioned the International Criminal Court’s top prosecutor after the court, based in The Hague, Netherlands, issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, an ally of President Donald Trump.

The sanctions led Microsoft to cancel Khan’s ICC email, a move that was first reported by the Associated Press and raised fears of a “kill switch” that big tech companies could use to disable the service at will.

Microsoft says it remained in contact with the ICC “throughout the process that resulted in its sanctioned manager being disconnected from Microsoft services. At no time did Microsoft cease or suspend its services to the ICC.”

Microsoft Chairman Brad Smith has repeatedly sought to strengthen transatlantic ties, the company’s press office said, citing an interview he gave last month to CNN in Davos in which he said jobs, trade and investment were important. as well as security, would be affected by a rupture over Greenland.

“Europe is the largest market for the US technology sector after the US itself. It’s all about trust. Trust requires dialogue,” Smith said.

Other incidents fueled the movement. There is a growing sense that the EU’s repeated efforts to rein in tech giants such as Google with blockbuster antitrust fines and sweeping digital rules have done little to curb their dominance.

Billionaire Elon Musk is also a factor. Officials are concerned about relying on its Starlink satellite internet system for communications in Ukraine.

Washington and Brussels have argued for years over data transfer agreements, triggered by whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations about US cyber espionage.

With online services now primarily hosted in the cloud via data centers, Europeans fear their data could be vulnerable.

US cloud providers have responded by setting up so-called “sovereign cloud” operations, with data centers located in European countries, owned by European entities and with physical and remote access only for staff residing in the European Union.

The idea is that “only Europeans can make decisions so they cannot be coerced by the United States,” Reiners said.

Last year, the German state of Schleswig-Holstein migrated the inboxes of 44,000 Microsoft employees to an open source email program. It has also moved from Microsoft’s SharePoint file sharing system to Nextcloud, an open source platform, and is even considering replacing Windows with Linux and phones and video conferencing with open source systems.

“We want to become independent from big tech companies and ensure digital sovereignty,” Digitalization Minister Dirk Schrödter said in a statement in October.

The French city of Lyon announced last year that it was rolling out free office software to replace Microsoft. The Danish government and the cities of Copenhagen and Aarhus have also tested open source software.

“We must never make ourselves so dependent on so few people that we can no longer act freely,” Digital Minister Caroline Stage Olsen wrote on LinkedIn last year. “Too much public digital infrastructure is currently tied to very few foreign providers. »

The Austrian military said it also switched to LibreOffice, a software package that includes word processing, spreadsheet and presentation programs that mirror Microsoft 365’s Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

The Document Foundation, a Germany-based nonprofit behind LibreOffice, said the Army’s change “reflects a growing demand for independence from single vendors.” Reports also indicate that the military is concerned about Microsoft moving online file storage to the cloud – the standard version of LibreOffice is not cloud-based.

Some Italian cities and regions adopted the software years ago, said Italo Vignoli, a spokesman for The Document Foundation. Back then, there was no need to pay for software licenses. Now the main reason is to avoid being locked into a proprietary system.

“At the beginning it was: We’re going to save money and, by the way, we’ll have freedom,” Vignoli said. “Today it is: we will be free and, by the way, we will also save money.”

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Associated Press writer Molly Hague in The Hague, Netherlands, contributed to this report.