You’re a French bureaucrat sitting at your desk in Paris. You’ve got your coffee, your croissant, and your daily video call with colleagues. For years, you’ve clicked that familiar blue Zoom icon or fired up Microsoft Teams without a second thought. It just works. It’s American, sure, but who cares?
Turns out, the French government cares. A lot.
In a move that’s sending shockwaves through the tech world, France just announced that 2.5 million civil servants will ditch Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Webex, and GoTo Meeting by 2027 . They’re replacing them all with something called “Visio”—a homegrown, French-built video conferencing platform that most people outside government walls have never heard of .
This isn’t just about software. This is about something much bigger, much messier, and much more personal. This is about a continent waking up to the uncomfortable realization that its digital infrastructure is basically a rental unit owned by landlords 3,000 miles away. And when those landlords start making political threats? The tenants start looking for the exit.
The Wake-Up Call That Changed Everything
To understand why France is doing this, you have to understand what happened last year. And no, it wasn’t about privacy policies or data storage locations—the usual boring stuff that makes tech journalists nod off.
It was about the International Criminal Court and a canceled email account .
When the Trump administration sanctioned the ICC’s top prosecutor after the court issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, something unexpected happened. Microsoft, complying with U.S. sanctions, canceled the prosecutor’s email account . Just like that. Poof. Gone.
For European officials watching from across the Atlantic, it was a horror movie playing out in slow motion. Here was proof that American tech companies—the very ones powering their governments’ daily communications—could be forced to pull the plug at Washington’s command.
“It was a decisive moment,” Nick Reiners, a senior analyst at the Eurasia Group, told reporters . The fear crystallized overnight: if the U.S. can cut off the ICC’s email, what stops them from cutting off France’s? Or Germany’s? Or anyone who dares to cross the administration?
Microsoft insists it “kept in touch with the ICC throughout the process” and that “at no point did Microsoft cease or suspend its services to the ICC” . But the damage was done. The “kill switch” fear was real, and it was spreading through European capitals faster than a bad baguette .
Enter Visio: The Software That Wants to Save France
So what exactly is this mysterious French alternative that’s about to replace your favorite blue video app?
Visio isn’t some startup’s passion project. It’s a government-built platform developed with Outscale, a France-based cloud company, and it comes with French AI companies Pyannote and Kyutai handling the fancy stuff like transcription and subtitling . It’s about as French as a baguette wearing a beret while riding a bicycle.
The government’s announcement was refreshingly blunt about why they’re doing this. The objective, they said, is “to put an end to the use of non-European solutions, to guarantee the security and confidentiality of public electronic communications” .
David Amiel, a civil service minister, put it even more starkly: “We cannot risk having our scientific exchanges, our sensitive data, and our strategic innovations exposed to non-European actors” .
Translation: We don’t trust you anymore. And we’re not sure we ever should have.
The Dominoes Are Falling Across Europe
Here’s the thing about France’s move—it’s not happening in isolation. It’s more like watching a row of dominos, each one knocking over the next.
- Germany’s Schleswig-Holstein state already moved 44,000 employee inboxes from Microsoft to an open-source email program. They’re even considering swapping Windows for Linux . Their Digitalization Minister Dirk Schrödter put it simply: “We want to become independent of large tech companies and ensure digital sovereignty” .
- Austria’s military has dropped Microsoft Office entirely, switching to LibreOffice for writing reports . The concern? Microsoft was moving file storage to the cloud, and the military wanted their data staying put.
- The French city of Lyon is deploying free office software to replace Microsoft .
- Denmark’s government and the cities of Copenhagen and Aarhus are experimenting with open-source alternatives .
- Even the messaging apps are getting the boot. French officials have been asked to use “Tchap,” a government-designed messaging app, instead of WhatsApp or Signal .
Danish Digital Minister Caroline Stage Olsen summed up the sentiment perfectly on LinkedIn: “We must never make ourselves so dependent on so few that we can no longer act freely. Too much public digital infrastructure is currently tied up with very few foreign suppliers” .
The Elon Musk Factor
If Microsoft’s email cancellation was the first punch, Elon Musk might be the second.
European officials are increasingly worried about relying on Musk’s Starlink satellite internet system, particularly for communications in Ukraine . When one man—a famously unpredictable one at that—controls critical infrastructure, it tends to make defense planners nervous.
And just last week, French authorities took things up a notch. They raided X’s Paris offices as part of an expanding investigation into Grok and the company’s algorithms . Even more dramatically, they summoned Elon Musk himself for “questioning,” demanding he appear at an April 20th hearing in Paris .
Musk, predictably, called it a “political attack” . Whether it is or isn’t, the message is clear: Europe isn’t playing nice anymore.
The Money Question: Taxes and Tariffs
Of course, none of this is happening in a vacuum. While France is booting American software from government computers, it’s also doubling down on taxing American companies.
French lawmakers recently voted to double the country’s digital services tax on large tech companies from 3% to 6% . That means companies like Amazon, Google, and Meta will pay twice as much on their digital revenues in France.
The Trump administration has long threatened retaliation over this tax. After the Google antitrust fine, Trump posted on social media: “The European Union must stop this practice against American Companies, IMMEDIATELY!” . U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer has threatened European companies like SAP, Spotify, and Mistral with “fees or restrictions” unless Brussels backs down .
It’s shaping up to be a full-blown trade war, and the battlefield is your video calls.
The Deeper Question: Who Controls Your Data?
Beneath all the political posturing and tariff threats lies a more fundamental question that actually affects regular people: who really controls your data?
Here’s the problem that keeps European officials up at night. Even when American cloud providers set up data centers in Europe—which many have done—those centers are still owned by American companies. And American companies are subject to American law .
The Patriot Act, the Cloud Act, sanctions, and a hundred other legal mechanisms mean that the U.S. government can, under certain circumstances, demand access to data stored anywhere in the world by American companies.
U.S. providers have tried to address this by creating “sovereign cloud” operations—data centers located in Europe, owned by European entities, with access limited to European Union residents . The idea is that “only Europeans can take decisions so that they can’t be coerced by the U.S.” .
But for many European governments, that’s not enough. They want full ownership, full control, and zero dependence.
The Irony at the Heart of It All
Here’s the thing that makes this whole situation almost comical. Both the U.S. and Europe are trying to do the same thing: rein in Big Tech. They just can’t agree on how .
The U.S. approach is traditional antitrust litigation—suing companies, trying to break them up through the courts. The problem? American judges are proving reluctant to actually order breakups, even when they find monopolies.
Europe’s approach is proactive regulation. The Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act impose rules upfront. Violations trigger automatic fines. It’s faster, more administrative, and frankly, more effective at producing actual enforcement actions .
Last year alone, Europe fined Google €2.95 billion, Apple €500 million, Meta €200 million, and X €120 million . That’s not chump change, and it’s not nothing.
But instead of coordinating their efforts against common targets—the tech giants both sides claim to want to regulate—the U.S. and Europe are increasingly treating each other as the enemy.
What This Means for Regular People
If you’re sitting at home reading this, you might be wondering: do I care if French bureaucrats use Zoom or Visio?
Probably not directly. But here’s why you should pay attention.
First, this is a test case. If France succeeds in building and scaling its own video platform, other countries will follow. The European market is huge. If American tech companies start losing government contracts across the continent, it affects their bottom line, which affects their stock prices, which affects your 401(k).
Second, the “sovereignty” trend isn’t stopping at government software. It’s spreading to cloud computing, AI development, and eventually consumer products . The more Europe builds its own tech stack, the more fragmented the global internet becomes.
Third, and most personally, this whole mess raises a question worth asking yourself: who has a “kill switch” for your digital life? If your email provider, your cloud storage, your messaging apps are all American companies, what happens if political winds shift?
It’s not a comfortable question. But it’s the one France just asked itself—and answered with a decisive “non.”
The Bottom Line
France’s move to ditch Zoom and Teams isn’t really about video conferencing. It’s about trust, or the lack thereof. It’s about waking up one day and realizing that the tools you depend on can be yanked away by people 3,000 miles away who don’t share your interests.
Microsoft President Brad Smith, trying to keep the peace, put it well: “Europe is the American tech sector’s biggest market after the United States itself. It all depends on trust. Trust requires dialogue” .
The problem is, after the ICC email cancellation, after the Greenland threats, after the tariff wars and the tax fights and the X raids, that trust is looking pretty thin.
Italo Vignoli, a spokesman for The Document Foundation behind LibreOffice, captured the shift perfectly. He said that years ago, the appeal of open-source software was saving money. “Today it is: we will be free and by the way, we will also save some money” .
Freedom first. Savings second. That’s the new math of European tech policy.
And for American companies watching their biggest foreign market slowly build walls around itself? That’s a problem no amount of software updates can fix.
BY MATHEW BURNS