France To Ditch US Platforms Microsoft Teams, Zoom For 'Sovereign Platform' Amid Security Concerns (euronews.com)
- Reference: 0180665926
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/01/27/1737239/france-to-ditch-us-platforms-microsoft-teams-zoom-for-sovereign-platform-amid-security-concerns
- Source link: https://www.euronews.com/next/2026/01/27/france-to-ditch-us-platforms-microsoft-teams-zoom-for-sovereign-platform-amid-security-con
> The move is part of France's strategy to stop using foreign software vendors, especially those from the United States, and regain control over critical digital infrastructure. It comes at a crucial moment as France, like Europe, reaches a turning point regarding digital sovereignty.
>
> "The aim is to end the use of non-European solutions and guarantee the security and confidentiality of public electronic communications by relying on a powerful and sovereign tool," said David Amiel, minister for the civil service and state reform. On Monday, the government announced it will instead be using the French-made videoconference platform Visio. The platform has been in testing for a year and has around 40,000 users.
[1] https://www.euronews.com/next/2026/01/27/france-to-ditch-us-platforms-microsoft-teams-zoom-for-sovereign-platform-amid-security-con
Good Luck (Score:2)
It's no problem to use Rocket Chat or Jitsi for your chat and video calling.
The problem is the network effect. Where do all the participants live? The networking effect says that this plan fails because everybody lives on Teams, or Slack, and to a disturbingly growing level, Discord.
Naming video platform Visio was beyond stupid and almost certain to get them sued by Microsoft.
Re: (Score:2)
They make french mirrors? They can just talk to themselves in front of them.
Re:Good Luck (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe other people have different experiences but in my day to day I end up having to use all of those and then some because it's not always my own companies meetings I have to join.
My company uses Google Meet for 90% of calls but also use Zoom for larger calls then many of our clients use Teams so I'll have to connect to that. Some use Zoom, some even still use WebEx so when needed I will use that. Someone a couple months ago was still using GoToMeeting.
It's annoying but how it ends up you have to use all of these when required to, there is no network effect here. If France wants to have their own platform it will be mildly annoying to have to use yet another platform but really it's just that, mildly irritating and I would still probably prefer it to Teams.
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That's kind of my point. They'll still have to use Teams/Meet/Zoom and now their own home grown POS. It's only a matter of time before they abandon their lesser used system because most of those that they will be interacting with, will be on the foreign systems. And that includes their own citizens.
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> It's only a matter of time before they abandon their lesser used system
I'm not sure how your argument fits with the fact that this is about government services and agencies. It does not matter it's a lesser used system, or what the majority of citizens use, really, citizen don't do government work, don't discuss state secrets.
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> still have to use Teams/Meet/Zoom
Uh? The whole idea of this exercise is to abandon the US governed systems by having a locally grown alternative.
No doubt this will be followed by a cut-off date for the US systems.
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> The problem is the network effect. Where do all the participants live? The networking effect says that this plan fails because everybody lives on Teams, or Slack, and to a disturbingly growing level, Discord.
(rhetorical) How did Teams and Slack get into the position where they have this network effect?
There's no reason something new, or something old that is new again, couldn't do the same and capture said market share.
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> There's no reason something new, or something old that is new again, couldn't do the same and capture said market share.
There's an endless list of reasons. But I'll grant that, though improbable, it is possible for that to happen.
Slack got there by being first to effectively market their vision, combined with a decent product, at the time. They weren't first to market, one could say that.
Teams got there because of Microsoft's size, and them jamming it onto every computer on the planet, no matter how much you tried to prevent it.
Zoom got there because it was super simple and just worked, when Facebook users discovered it duri
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>> There's no reason something new, or something old that is new again, couldn't do the same and capture said market share.
> There's an endless list of reasons. But I'll grant that, though improbable, it is possible for that to happen.
I'd go so far as to say that is extremely improbable that Teams and Slack will enjoy the same roles 50 years from now. It's kinda like that joke that ends in, "Now we're just haggling over the price" [^1]. It's not really a question of "if", but "when". It's easy to look at it right now and claim they won't be able to immediately replace its market share, and you might even wager they won't be able to this year or the next, but how far into the future would you wager that holds true? The only way to get the
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This is a fair argument and I agree with it.
But, I'd say that the replacement for Teams/Slack will be built to be a better mouse trap. Viso isn't a better mouse trap. It is just a 'not hosted here' mouse trap.
My point is that I feel it's unlikely that the app motivated by government mandate for political reasons will be the better system. The new system that takes over the market will be better built, easier to use, have an as yet unknown killer feature... something that makes it more desirable than the inc
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Internally, large outfits will use whatever IT procures and small outfits will use whatever is free. Externally everyone will use whatever their clients demand them use or their partners can be convinced to peer with.
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Precisely. And more often than not, these things can be easily run from one's browser
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Why would they be sued? For not using Teams?
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Because Visio is also the name of a MS product.
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There is now a company called "Minix", which makes fanless, mini PCs (same form factors as the Mac Minis), and apparently, Andy Tanenbaum hasn't thought it fit to contest them
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Microsoft Visio is a diagramming and vectorgraphics application used to create flowcharts, org charts, network diagrams, floor plans, and other structured visuals. I've used it myself in some of my previous jobs.
Unfortunate name (Score:4, Informative)
Too bad they called their solution Visio. That will confuse people familiar with Microsoft's Visio.
Also, there's already an open-source self-hostable solution called [1]Galene [galene.org] that is developed in France. I host an instance, and I used it when I was supposed to have a Zoom chat with someone. Zoom was down, so I suggested my Galene instance instead and it worked perfectly.
[1] https://galene.org/
response to AI (Score:2)
With US AI companies gobbling up all data, like Copilot's and other's consuming all documents, data and postings, the EU has much stronger privacy standards. They are tired of being held hostage by US greed of profit over people orientation. It's too bad the supposed country who cries "freedom" is so ignorantly down to position 36 [1]https://freedomhouse.org/count... [freedomhouse.org] on the ranking of free countries.
[1] https://freedomhouse.org/country/scores
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Being that the list is sorted by score, and alphabetically, it's pretty dumb to mention someone's position on it, now isn't it?
The US has a score of 84/100. France is at 89/100.
The difference is not as great as you want it to be.
Don't ever let rationality get in the way of your political mouth-foaming, my friend. The world just doesn't have enough people like you.
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Woo, Canada gets 97/100 on the "Freedom in the World" score. That's not too bad.
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Ya, there are a few rockstars on there, for sure. Canada being one of them.
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Also, as someone who lives around works with a good bit of Canadians (we have a lot over here in Seattle :) I'm unsurprised by this. They're generally the best natured people on the damn planet.
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> country who cries "freedom"
At least I won't have to worry about getting arrested for an [1]offensive tweet [telegraph.co.uk].
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/09/03/the-victims-of-britains-free-speech-crackdown/
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[1]Not yet. [politico.com] Doesn't mean we aren't working on it.
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/19/trump-no-longer-free-speech-00574219
Good for you France! (Score:2)
Competition is the best motivator of innovation!
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This isn't anything competitive about this nor will it breed any innovation.
Perhaps France should adopt the Trump playbook (Score:2)
They should demand that Microsoft sell majority ownership and control of all in-country Microsoft products to a French group.
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M$ Market Cap is about the same as France GDP. If M$ cares about what France thinks, it might be easier for them to just buy France. /sarcasm
Good news for France, America, and everyone else (Score:2)
The nice thing about Europeans finally doing this, is that they might create and use standards!
And if they do that, then not just France, but everyone can dump their proprietary meeting software.
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There's no mention of Visio being open-source, and indeed, it looks like just another [1]proprietary platform [visio-experts.com]. France is really missing an opportunity here.
OTOH, having dealt with the French government's procurement process in the past, it's a frickin' bureaucratic nightmare and I suspect the winners are the ones who most successfully wined and dined the politicians...
[1] https://www.visio-experts.com/
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The french government pages on Visio indicate that it is part of "La Suite Numérique" and that it is an open-source project. It does not appear to be related to the commercial platform you link to (which smells rather fishy).
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Oh, thanks for the correction! You are right, and La Suite Numérique even has a [1]GitHub [github.com] organization. Very cool; I might look at their "meet" software.
[1] https://github.com/suitenumerique
Local Server (Score:2)
I can understand the logic for Teams, which only works using the 365 cloud infrastructure. However, Zoom still lets you run a local server.
[1]https://support.zoom.com/hc/en... [zoom.com]
[1] https://support.zoom.com/hc/en/article?id=zm_kb&sysparm_article=KB0060771
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It's closed-source, though, and therefore IMO not trustworthy for a government to use.
Blame NAT... (Score:5, Interesting)
You used to have various standard video conferencing software - eg microsoft netmeeting back in the days, which allowed direct communication between individuals without depending on a central service. Larger orgs could run a central service of their own if they wished, and external callers could connect in to it.
Now most users only have partial legacy connectivity encumbered by NAT and might not have IPv6 so this peer to peer approach no longer works, instead you get locked in to a centralised system. And since these centralised systems require a LOT of bandwidth and geographical diversity to reduce latency they cost huge amounts to keep running.
So the real answer is finish the deployment of IPv6 (which France is doing quite well at compared to other countries) and then use existing standards like SIP instead of relying on centralised services.
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Currently, France is #1 in terms of IPv6 adaption - close to 80%. So they should be able to set up an IPv6-only conferencing solution similar to Teams, and they won't have to think about NAT at all. Other Europeans who want to use that service can either go IPv6 themselves, or if they have to be IPv4, they can use NAT64 to connect
Re:Blame NAT... (Score:4, Interesting)
France is a country.
The people using what ever solution they use: are not necessarily in that country. Even if you count remote territories as "in the country".
So IP4 versus IP6 is hardly an argument in either direction.
No idea where this IP4 versus IP6 numbers come from anyway: everybody here has IP6 *and* IP4.
The most backyard the country, the more modern is the internet infrastructure, and the more they have IP6.
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Yeah, but a French based enterprise will probably, by default, follow whatever the conventions are in France before they start engaging in the localization exercises for other countries in Europe. The assumption here is that this is a Euro-centric service, similar to Microsoft Teams or Zoom, but by, for and of Europeans. So chances are that they'll first set it up in France, and then see what they have to do to make it workable for people from Lisbon to Kharkiv, and from Reykjavik to Nicosia. If not havi
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This has nothing whatsoever to do with NAT. This is about getting off of American software platforms. NetMeeting, a Microsoft product, would also be on the chopping block.
> Larger orgs could run a central service of their own if they wished, and external callers could connect in to it.
Anyone, even private individuals can run a central server for countless chat and video apps, many of them open source and free.
The data sovereignty thing is a Not Invented Here reaction that will only cost these countries a fortune before they are abandoned and everyone settles on Teams, Slack, Zoom, Meet, again.
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If the issue is security concerns it would be easy enough to see that "old fashioned" h323 or SIP solutions do or don't send media streams anywhere but where you expect them to. Similarly if you are worried about even the toll record content, you could stand up your own gateways and federation, keep it all on official national government infrastructure or with a domestic provider that is trusteded etc.
So there would be not need to obsess over who the vendor is. Color me conspiratorial but I rather think th
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> that will only cost these countries a fortune
TFA says it saves them money. The savings is easy to compute, it's the difference between the old Microsoft Teams subscription and the new Thalès subscription.
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That is not how it is though.
You're ignoring all the lost time in the economy while people spend getting their IT to install someone other client so they can attend an online meeting with a bureaucrat or vice versa.
All the lost revenue from people who might have attended some French companies webinar but said 'screw it I am not installing software just so I can listen to a pitch' and so on.
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Usually, there is a transition period involved, where an entity would continue using the old solution that it plans to discontinue - be it Teams or Zoom - while the new one gets rolled out. The new one would get tested by businesses and other organizations throughout its target market, and as they pass every milestone, they'll ultimately get greenlighted, and only then will they stop the usage of Teams or Zoom
And yeah, not all French companies may choose to ditch Teams or Zoom just b'cos the French gover
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> that will only cost these countries a fortune
Video chat programs are practically a Hello World example. There are a bazillion of them, most of which are defunct because nobody wants to install half a dozen of the things.
I expect the EU and maybe more of the non-US world will get together and provide a critical base for a non-US one. We can hope it will kill Teams.
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I'd think that Zoom is the bigger player. Just in my experience, except when I have been talking to someone at Microsoft, I have rarely had to use Teams
The only way I think this might work is if the EU requires a video conferencing package to be pre-installed on every computer sold in the EU, be it on Windows, Mac OSs, Linux, BSDs,.... Only if they can pull that off can it work, but even then, it would have to be at par w/ Zoom in terms of both features, as well as ease of use
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
A major issue why this hasn't happened is a chicken and egg situation where the protocols for discovery et al all assume NAT and thus a requirement for centralized servers.
Plus, to be honest, ISPs are being bloody minded about it. I don't know about France, but T-Mobile in the US blocks incoming connections (and may not be the only one), and the ISPs themselves lobbied to cripple reverse DNS. I've even heard of ISPs constantly changing the IP block associated with a customer, despite that crippling any kind
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> IPv6 is one of the things I'd like to see informed governments impose mandates about. Every ISP customer should have a static /64 at minimum with nothing blocked and control over their own DNS.
It would be interesting, maybe if there were some consumer protection rules that required ISPs to make these things available at no extra cost upon request. I am actually not sure this is a sane default though. Remember what the internet was like when everyone had a public address and usually there was no home NAT involved?
Sure maybe software is a little better now, but the WinNuke like drive-by attacks were pretty damn irritating. Everyone trying to learn python and starting a local http server that is r
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NAT traversal is a solved problem.
Most ISPs these days are using TR-69 managed CPEs, and they're managed over the same NAT that they've got you behind. And they don't have special holes poked.
All we need is a STUN server, and a quick evaluation of what the kind of NAT it is (full-cone, half-cone, etc)
None of this has anything to do with NAT.
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> A major issue why this hasn't happened is a chicken and egg situation where the protocols for discovery et al all assume NAT and thus a requirement for centralized servers.
False. There were multiple ways Skype traversed NAT without issue. UPnp, Peer routing, and UDP hole punching all very effectively routed Skype from behind NAT.
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> informed governments
Whoo! Thanks, I needed a good laugh.
IPv6 block sales (Score:2)
Yeah, ISPs should be strongly advised by the RIRs - maybe this should be put into the terms of the sale of those blocks - to make them static for each customer. There is absolutely no reason for the prefixes to be constantly changed every session: the CPEs can be configured to change the interface IDs every session if needed, be it using DHCPv6 or SLAAC, and that is adequate for privacy, aside from the firewall. Also, w/ more and more people getting home servers, it's a good idea for those prefixes to be
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This is completely wrong.
1) NAT traversal is a very solved problem.
2) Centralized services do not require more bandwidth than peer-to-peer. And frankly, I think you have no idea how cheap bandwidth is for us these days.
3) Video-conferencing takes surprisingly little bandwidth. You'd be amazed how well it compresses.
> and then use existing standards like SIP instead of relying on centralised services.
Ah yes, SIP.
That protocol that is notoriously defeated due to NAT... wait no. It isn't. Because NAT traversal is a very solved problem.
The centralization is about money. Nothing more.
Re: Blame NAT... (Score:2)
You kind of understand why most phone calls are so easily compressable, when you listen to phone call between your wife and mother in law
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A NAT doesn't stop you from doing peer to peer. Both Teams and Zoom use peer to peer connections for 1 to 1 video. If you can do that then you can do multiparticipant conferences too, as WhatsApp, Bittorrent and a bunch of others do.
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Genuine technical question: How does multi-participant peer-to-peer scale? 1-to1, Alice sends Bob her camera feed, and Bob sends his to Alice. Now if Charlie joins, does everyone's bandwidth in both directions double? And multiply by (N-1) when there are N participants? Even if your incoming bandwidth can be managed by only subscribing to a limited number of feeds, if you're the main speaker, everyone needs your feed. Do you rely on a backbone server somewhere (part of the internet infrastructure, not a ce
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In defence of the idiots who broke the end-to-end connectivity model of the internet by bitching about IPv6 addresses being hard to remember, Skype did actually work from behind NAT in a P2P model just fine. It used UDP hole punching and it was super effective. Combined with the advent of UPnP it was very much possible to traverse NAT using a variety of means.
It's still shit, but this process isn't entirely to blame for centralising video conferencing.
That said centralised video conferencing has provided a