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In France, civil servants will ditch Zoom and Teams for a homegrown video conference system. Soldiers in Austria are using open-source office software to write reports after the military dropped Microsoft Office. Bureaucrats in a German state have also turned to free software for their administrative work.
Around Europe, governments and institutions are seeking to reduce their use of digital services from U.S. Big Tech companies and turning to domestic or free alternatives. The push for “digital sovereignty” is gaining attention as the Trump administration strikes an increasingly belligerent posture toward the continent, highlighted by recent tensions over Greenland that intensified fears that Silicon Valley giants could be compelled to cut off access.
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 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.”
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, senior geotechnology analyst at the Eurasia Group.
This article was provided by The Associated Press.