France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Experiences with Microsoft Teams and Zoom

  • Large portion of the thread is pure venting about Teams: slow, resource‑hungry, buggy, poor notifications, fragile integrations, awkward UI, broken copy‑paste, flaky audio/video, and terrible Linux support.
  • Several describe the M365 stack (Teams/SharePoint/Exchange/OneDrive) as an over‑integrated, brittle maze where renames, file handling, and permissions often break in confusing ways.
  • Some defend Teams: “good enough” for calls and group chat, tightly bundled with Office and therefore cost‑effective for large orgs. A few report no real issues, especially on newer hardware or Macs.
  • Zoom is seen as technically solid (especially audio/video quality), but disliked for dark patterns around the web client and previous security concerns.
  • Many argue these products persist due to bundling, licensing, and switching costs, not because they are actually “the best”.

Motivations for European Digital Sovereignty

  • Many commenters see France’s move as overdue: relying on US cloud and collaboration tools is framed as a strategic and security risk (Cloud Act, sanctions, “kill switch” scenarios like the ICC email cutoff).
  • There’s broad support for governments controlling their own comms stack, especially for sensitive state functions. Vendor and country lock‑in are treated analogously to any other risky dependency.
  • Some argue this shift would have happened eventually; Trump’s administration is seen as an accelerator that made US instability and politicization impossible to ignore.

Open‑Source and “La Suite Numérique”

  • France’s approach is praised: building and open‑sourcing its own tools (Django/React‑based) for chat, docs, spreadsheets, files, and video (Visio), often leveraging existing OSS (Matrix/Element, LiveKit, Grist, etc.).
  • Other European efforts are cited: German “OpenDesk”, BigBlueButton, Jitsi, Zulip, Nextcloud, Matrix, Rocket.Chat, Galene, and various self‑hostable stacks.
  • Some note inconsistencies (hosting code on GitHub, using US‑origin frameworks) but others see that as acceptable so long as deployment and data remain under European control.

Doubts About Europe’s Capacity and Strategy

  • Skeptics argue this is symbolic: government‑only, small revenue impact for US firms, and Europe still lacks large native tech platforms, capital depth, and unified markets.
  • Others counter that OSS plus sustained public investment and procurement can bootstrap a real ecosystem, and that aiming for many mid‑sized, interoperable vendors is preferable to cloning US monopolies.

Broader Political Debate

  • Long subthreads dissect US voter behavior, democracy’s health, literacy, and whether US hegemony has been net positive or negative.
  • Several Europeans stress this is less about “blaming America” and more about reducing systemic risk and re‑building local capabilities after decades of underinvestment.