When Digital Sovereignty Actually Makes Sense
There’s something quietly significant happening in France right now that probably won’t make much noise outside tech circles, but it’s worth paying attention to. The French government is rolling out their own video conferencing platform, essentially ditching Zoom and Microsoft Teams in favour of a homegrown solution they’re calling “Visio” (yes, the same name as Microsoft’s diagramming tool, which is either brilliantly cheeky or a massive oversight depending on your perspective).
On the surface, this might seem like just another government IT project destined to be a boondoggle. We’ve all seen those, haven’t we? Here in Australia, we’ve had our fair share of spectacular technology project failures that would make anyone skeptical of government-built software. But I think there’s something more interesting going on here that touches on issues we should all be thinking about.
The thing is, France isn’t wrong to be nervous about their reliance on American cloud and communication services. When you’re running a government—or any organisation handling sensitive information, really—you’re essentially trusting that the companies providing your infrastructure won’t be compelled by their home government to do things you might not be comfortable with. The US CLOUD Act, for instance, can require US companies to hand over data stored anywhere in the world. That’s not conspiracy theory stuff; that’s just how the law works.
From a DevOps perspective, having your critical communication infrastructure entirely dependent on foreign commercial providers does create some legitimate concerns around data sovereignty and operational resilience. What happens if geopolitical tensions rise? What happens if a company decides to change its terms of service in ways that don’t align with your needs? What happens if there’s a major outage and you’re just another customer in the queue?
I’ve been thinking about this in the context of Australia too. We’re even more dependent on American tech giants than Europe is. Pretty much every significant piece of digital infrastructure we use—from cloud services to collaboration tools to social media—is owned and operated by US companies. Don’t get me wrong, I use plenty of this stuff myself. I’m writing this on a MacBook, I have an iPhone in my pocket, and my workplace runs on various American SaaS platforms. But maybe we should at least be having conversations about whether that’s entirely wise.
The question, of course, is whether France can actually pull this off. Building software that competes with Zoom and Teams is no small feat. These are mature products backed by enormous companies with vast resources. The risk is that they end up with something that technically works but is clunky enough that people find ways around it. I can easily imagine French public servants officially using Visio while quietly scheduling important calls on WhatsApp or Signal instead.
But here’s the thing that gives me some hope: it’s actually not that hard to build a decent video conferencing system anymore. The underlying technologies are well-understood, and there are open-source components you can build on. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. What’s harder is getting the user experience right and achieving the scale to make it reliable. France is a wealthy country with talented developers and a large public sector that can act as a captive market while the platform matures. If any single European country can make this work, they probably can.
What I find particularly interesting is the broader pattern this represents. There’s a growing recognition that maybe the world shouldn’t be quite so dependent on a handful of American tech companies for critical infrastructure. That doesn’t mean those companies are evil or that their products are bad—often they’re excellent. But monocultures are fragile, whether we’re talking about agriculture or technology ecosystems. Having alternatives, especially ones that operate under different legal and governance frameworks, makes the whole system more resilient.
Some people online are suggesting this should extend beyond Europe to Commonwealth countries as well, and I can see the logic there. We’ve seen what can happen when a single company decides to, say, block news content on their platform or make changes to their algorithms that affect public discourse. Having more diversity in the technology landscape seems sensible.
The slightly frustrating bit is that this all feels a bit late. The open-source community has been banging on about these issues for years, and there are already decent open-source alternatives for much of this stuff. Jitsi, Matrix, and others have been around for ages. But governments and large organisations have been slow to adopt them, partly because they lack the polish and enterprise support of commercial offerings, and partly because there’s a certain safety in going with the big names.
Still, better late than never. If France’s experiment works, it might encourage other countries to invest in similar initiatives. And competition is generally good for consumers. If Microsoft has to worry about losing market share to European alternatives, maybe they’ll think twice about some of their more questionable decisions around privacy, data handling, and feature bloat.
The test will be in the execution. France needs to build something that actually works well, that people don’t actively hate using, and that demonstrates clear benefits beyond just being “not American.” But if they can manage that, this could be the start of a more diverse and resilient global technology ecosystem. And from where I’m sitting in Melbourne, watching our own increasing dependence on foreign tech infrastructure, that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.