France to scrap Zoom, Meet, Webex for homegrown rival
Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité... Souveraineté?
data sovereignty
The French government will abandon American video conferencing platforms for a “sovereign”, homegrown alternative called Visio.
The software is among “La Suite” of open-source software platforms being developed by France, with input from Germany and Holland.
The government confirmed the move in a press release today.
Visio is a “concrete example of the Prime Minister and the Government's commitment to regaining our digital independence,” it said.
“The goal: 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.” - The French Ministry of the Economy "BERCY"
A “state-controlled solution”
"The gradual rollout over the coming months of a unified, state-controlled solution based on French technologies marks a significant step in strengthening our digital resilience,” said the French Ministry of Economy, Finance, and Industrial and Digital Sovereignty, aka “BERCY”.
The ministry said the software will be hosted on local data centres by Outscale, a subsidiary of French aerospace firm Dassault. Swapping to open-source software (OSS) will save an estimated €1m ($1.18m) per year for every 100,000 users switching from licensed solutions, it added.
Visio is based on the LiveKit project – An Apache 2.0-licensed platform for voice, video and AI agentsn developed by... California-based LiveKit (which announced a $100 million Series C round on January 22.)
It was not immediately clear if France was building on its own fork or ready to respond to any future licensing rug-pull, should that deeply-unlikely-event happen. We'll ask the question and update this article when we have an answer. (The Visio page says "we are committed to actively contributing to its [LiveKit's] code by sharing our developments. This ensures sustainable code, maintained by a large community.")
First on the chopping block: Zoom
One immediate victim is Zoom...
The CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research) will replace Zoom with Visio for over 150,000 users by the end of March 2026, the ministry said. The French defence ministry and its national health insurance fund will swiftly follow suit within 2026, it added.
The plans are just the latest effort by France to standard pan-government communications around homegrown alternatives, like Matrix-based Tchap for chat, and AWS-hosted alternative Olvid.
Rampant concerns in European capitals that an unfriendly US administration could weaponise US SaaS dominance have accelerated plans to reduce Europe's transatlantic tech dependency.
“Big Tech” providers have been working through both new “sovereign” products and fulsome public statements to try and retain the goodwill of European government customers with mixed success...
(The UK appears to have no such qualms, recently signing deals with Google Cloud and Oracle to run sensitive defence workloads for example, with three-letter-agency customers also widely reported to have migrated some workloads to AWS.
“Many government departments currently use too many different tools (Teams, Zoom, GoTo Meeting, or Webex), a situation that weakens data security, creates strategic dependencies on external infrastructures, represents additional financial costs, and complicates cooperation between ministries,” said BERCY – promising French technology firm-powered AI transcription and subtitling as well later in 2026.
Reaction to follow.
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