By Vass Bednar
Publication Date: 2026-02-10 11:00:00
Vass Bednar is the managing director of the Canadian SHIELD Institute and co-author of The Big Fix.
France just announced that they are ditching American platforms such as Microsoft Teams and Zoom in favour of more sovereign communication options. To make the switch, they are rolling out a government-built videoconferencing platform called Visio that will be implemented across all departments by 2027 and they’re banning government officials from using Teams or Zoom during work. It’s worth noting that Visio is hosted on the French company Outscale’s sovereign cloud infrastructure, which is a subsidiary of French software company Dassault Systèmes.
It isn’t the only government motivated to source or build alternatives as the vulnerabilities from relying on American technology sharpen. The world is trying to log off U.S. tech: Germany is also moving toward open-source alternatives. The Dutch Court of Audit warned that two-thirds of public cloud services lacked proper risk…
