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.