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

Concerns about data privacy and worries that Europe is not doing enough to keep up with the United States and Chinese tech leadership are also fueling the drive.

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

“We cannot risk having our scientific exchanges, our sensitive data, and our strategic innovations exposed to non-European actors,” David Amiel, a civil service minister, said in a press release.

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

The company said it is “focused on providing customers with greater choice, stronger data protection, and resilient cloud services — ensuring data stays in Europe, under European law, with robust security and privacy protections.”

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

French President Emmanuel Macron has been pushing digital sovereignty for years. But there’s now a lot more “political momentum behind this idea now that we need to de-risk from U.S. tech,” Nick Reiners, at the Eurasia Group.

“It feels kind of like there’s a real zeitgeist shift,” Reiners said

It was a hot topic at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting of global political and business elites last month in Davos, Switzerland. The European Commission's official for tech sovereignty, Henna Virkkunen, told an audience that Europe's reliance on others “can be weaponized against us.”

“That’s why it’s so important that we are not dependent on one country or one company when it comes to very critical fields of our economy or society,” she said, without naming countries or companies.

A decisive moment came last year when the Trump administration sanctioned the International Criminal Court's top prosecutor after the tribunal, 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 sparked fears of a “kill switch” that Big Tech companies can use to turn off service at will.

Microsoft maintains it kept in touch with the ICC “throughout the process that resulted in the disconnection of its sanctioned official from Microsoft services. At no point did Microsoft cease or suspend its services to the ICC.”

Microsoft President Brad Smith has repeatedly sought to strengthen trans-Atlantic ties, the company's press office said, and pointed to an interview he did last month with CNN in Davos in which he said that jobs, trade and investment. as well as security, would be affected by a rift over Greenland.

“Europe is the American tech sector’s biggest market after the United States itself. It all depends on trust. Trust requires dialogue,” Smith said.

Other incidents have added to the movement. There's a growing sense that repeated EU efforts to rein in tech giants such as Google with blockbuster antitrust fines and sweeping digital rule books haven't done much to curb their dominance.

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

Washington and Brussels wrangled for years over data transfer agreements, triggered by whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations of U.S. cyber-snooping.

With online services now mainly hosted in the cloud through data centers, Europeans fear that their data is vulnerable.

U.S. 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 who are European Union residents.

The idea is that “only Europeans can take decisions so that they can’t be coerced by the U.S.,” Reiners said.

The German state of Schleswig-Holstein last year migrated 44,000 employee inboxes from Microsoft to an open source email program. It also switched from Microsoft's SharePoint file sharing system to Nextcloud, an open source platform, and is even considering replacing Windows with Linux and telephones and videoconferencing with open source systems.

“We want to become independent of large tech companies and ensure digital sovereignty,” Digitalization Minister Dirk Schrödter said in an October announcement.

The French city of Lyon said last year that it's deploying free office software to replace Microsoft. Denmark’s government and the cities of Copenhagen and Aarhus have also been trying out open-source software.

“We must never make ourselves so dependent on so few 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 up with very few foreign suppliers.”

The Austrian military said it has also switched to LibreOffice, a software package with word processor, spreadsheet and presentation programs that mirrors Microsoft 365's Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

The Document Foundation, a nonprofit based in Germany that's behind LibreOffice, said the military's switch “reflects a growing demand for independence from single vendors.” Reports also said the military was concerned that Microsoft was moving file storage online 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, the appeal was not needing to pay for software licenses. Now, it's the main reason is to avoid being locked into a proprietary system.

“At first, it was: we will save money and by the way, we will get freedom,” Vignoli said. “Today it is: we will be free and by the way, we will also save some money.”

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