Digital sovereignty (1/3): Have Trump’s threats spurred a European awakening?

Out go Teams, Zoom and Google Meet. In comes Visio. 

The French administration is preparing to ditch popular US videoconferencing tools in favour of a homegrown equivalent starting in 2027, a move it says will ensure critical data and infrastructure remains in French hands. 

The aim, says David Amiel, the junior minister for the civil service and state reform, is to “end the use of non-European solutions and guarantee the security and confidentiality of electronic communications by relying on a powerful and sovereign tool”. 

Visio is part of a batch of French tech alternatives, called LaSuite, specifically developed for French officials and millions of public-sector workers. 

News of its impending launch comes at a time of increasingly urgent debate about the continent’s reliance on US Big Tech, which dominated discussions at the European Digital Sovereignty Summit in Berlin last November. 

The threat gets real 

The sudden sense of urgency is a direct consequence of US President Donald Trump’s aggressive rhetoric towards European allies and his open threats to seize the Danish territory of Greenland. 

While talk of technological ‘decoupling’ from the US is hardly new, the prospect of Washington slapping sanctions on Europe or cutting access to key technologies has dramatically altered the equation, says Francesca Musiani, head of the Internet and Society Centre at France’s National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). 

“The urgency stems from the fact that geopolitical tensions, for instance over Greenland, can rapidly escalate and push the US to take advantage of Europe’s technological reliance, which has been built up over decades,” Musiani explains. 

“US threats may have sounded like banter in the past, but Europeans have now realised, particularly with what happened in Venezuela, that Trump is entirely serious when he issues such warnings,” adds Christophe Grosbost, chief strategy officer at the Innovation Makers Alliance. 

Should Trump follow through on his threats and ask the likes of Meta, Google and Amazon to “completely cut off European access to their services, our societies and economies would be completely disrupted,” Grosbost warns. “It would be disastrous.” 

Such a step would be especially damaging to governments in Europe.  

“Technological reliance is most critical for public institutions because they handle sensitive data, perform sovereign functions and have an obligation to maintain continuity of service,” says Musiani, whose research has focused on matters of digital sovereignty. 

Europe’s ‘administrative and political inertia’ 

Given that most administrations process documents using Microsoft software and then store the data on servers hosted by US-based tech giants, any shift to homegrown systems must be undertaken with caution – barring which ordinary citizens will be the first affected. 

In Germany’s Schleswig-Holstein, “the local government recently decided to switch from Microsoft to open software (to signal their distrust of the US) – and clearly it was a bloody mess”, notes Jochim Selzer, a “digital self-defence" spokesperson for the Chaos Computer Club, Europe's oldest and largest “hacktivist” group.  

A month after severing all ties with the US behemoth, the authorities in the northern German state are still busy fixing the remaining bugs. 

Such difficulties largely explain the prevailing “administrative and political inertia” when it comes to ditching American tech, says Frans Imbert-Vier, CEO of Swiss-based technology consulting firm UBCOM and an advocate of technological independence. 

Read moreEurope’s digital reliance on US Big Tech: Does the EU have a plan?

This inertia can have knock-on effects. “The problem with state institutions is that their reliance affects the entire ecosystem. Once the administration uses a tool, it indirectly imposes it on its partners, service providers and citizens,” says Musiani.

European governments thus play into the hands of American Big Tech companies, allowing them to cement their hold on the digital daily lives of all public and private actors. This in turn lends more credibility to Trump’s threats to pull the plug on Europe, adds Musiani, for whom “the example must come from above”. 

But is banning Teams or Slack from French government agencies enough?  

Musiani describes the move as “symbolic” but a “big step” nonetheless, noting that “the discourse on digital sovereignty has struggled to materialise until now”. She adds: “At the very least, it signals a desire to reduce exposure to the American ecosystem as soon as a European alternative, however imperfect, becomes available.” 

‘Sovereignty washing’

Whether the shift to Visio reflects a long-term commitment to greater autonomy, or merely an opportunistic PR move, remains to be seen.  

A key obstacle is “the enduring attachment to Atlanticist policies, both in France and at the European level”, says Imbert-Vier, who is sceptical of any long-term European desire to tackle the continent’s cushy digital reliance on US systems. 

Ultimately, “it’s the money that speaks”, adds Martin Hullin, head of the European Network for Resilience and Technological Sovereignty at the Bertelsmann Foundation, highlighting the crucial role of public procurement in providing the basis for digital sovereignty. 

“It’s public contracts that make the difference,” he explains. “Nobody ever got fired for procuring Microsoft solutions (...). But if we say this is about safeguarding European democracies, perhaps we’ll be willing to bear the short-term consequences (of shifting to homegrown solutions).” 

Grasping the stakes is especially important for digital infrastructure and cloud services, which “needs to be considered a critical asset of society that must continue to function in a state of crisis, like roads, railways and energy grids”, says Johan Linaker, an expert on digital sovereignty at the Research Institutes of Sweden (RISE). 

As Europe gradually awakes to the challenge, Big Tech firms across the Atlantic have sensed the tide turning – and started to offer so-called ‘sovereign’ solutions. Earlier this month, Amazon launched its European Sovereign Cloud, which it claims is “entirely located within the EU”.

Critics, however, have been quick to warn against a “Euro-washing” of American cloud services. As Hullin notes, the data would still belong to a US company, which is liable to comply with US government orders.  

This article was translated from the original in French.