As European countries face tensions with the United States over the recent "Greenland annexation," they are accelerating moves to break away from U.S.-made software. With uncertainty growing in relations with the United States, once seen as their closest ally, the trend is interpreted as a push for self-reliance in software directly tied to security.
On the 29th local time, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu of France announced that instead of the U.S.-made videoconferencing platforms Zoom or Microsoft (MS) Teams, the government would use Visio, developed by the French government. In a letter to the cabinet, he said the transition is expected to be completed by the end of the year.
In a letter to ministers, Prime Minister Lecornu said, "Videoconferencing services now play a decisive role in the day-to-day operations of the central government," noting that non-European tools entail several risks, including cybersecurity vulnerabilities and a lack of control over data.
To develop its own videoconferencing platform, the French government worked with Outscale, a cloud company headquartered in France, and brought in French AI companies Pyannote and Kyutai to provide transcription and captioning services. Earlier, in July last year, France banned public sector workers from using WhatsApp and Telegram and ordered the use of Tchap, a messenger dedicated to the public sector.
The "de-Americanization" trend is continuing in other areas as well. Earlier, the French and German governments signed a contract in Nov. last year with German software company SAP and French artificial intelligence company Mistral AI to develop their own AI tools for the two countries' public administrations. With U.S.-made AI such as OpenAI's ChatGPT rapidly taking over the market, the move is seen as an attempt to achieve technological self-reliance at least in the public sector.
Alongside this, the German government has asked the German Center for Digital Sovereignty (ZenDiS) for support so government agencies can reduce their reliance on foreign software. ZenDiS developed OpenDesk to replace MS's workplace software, and last year the International Criminal Court (ICC) began switching from MS Office to this software.
The New York Times said, "Coming just days after relations between Europe and the United States further deteriorated over the Greenland sovereignty dispute, the announcement is part of a push by European countries to seek independence from foreign powers, including the United States, their longtime ally, in strategic areas such as defense and technology."
Europe is sensitive even to attempts by the United States to exert influence over its domestic software corporations. When a U.S. company spun off from IBM moved to acquire the operator of the Dutch mobile ID "DigiD," the Dutch parliament held a hearing to block it. The system identifies Dutch residents when they access government websites containing pension and health insurance information, and when news of the U.S. company's acquisition emerged, about 140,000 people joined a statement opposing it.
The U.S. political outlet Politico said, "The Netherlands has long supported the transatlantic alliance, and Dutch society, as well as the government, is built on U.S. technology and IT services," adding, "But as Trump has hurled various threats at Europe, this dependency structure is now being perceived as a serious security problem."