French civil servants will discontinue the use of Zoom and Teams, switching to a domestically developed video conferencing system; the Austrian military, after abandoning Microsoft's office software, has begun using an open-source office suite to draft reports; officials in a German state have also implemented free software for administrative tasks.
Across Europe today, governments and institutions are actively reducing their reliance on digital services provided by major US tech companies, turning instead to local or free alternatives. As the Trump administration adopts an increasingly assertive stance toward the European continent—recent disputes over Greenland have heightened market anxieties—fears are growing that Silicon Valley giants could be compelled to cut off services, bringing the push for "digital sovereignty" into sharp focus.
Concerns over data privacy, coupled with apprehensions that Europe is lagging in the competitive race, are further accelerating this trend.
The French government announced last week that by 2027, 2.5 million civil servants will stop using video conferencing tools from US suppliers like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Webex, and GoTo Meeting, transitioning instead to the domestic service "Visio." The French government's statement referenced some of these concerns.
The statement indicated that the move aims to "end the use of non-European solutions, ensuring the security and confidentiality of public electronic communications by relying on a robust and sovereign tool."
French Minister for Public Transformation and Service David Amiel stated in a press release: "We cannot risk exposing our scientific exchanges, sensitive data, and strategic innovations to non-European entities."
Microsoft responded by saying it would continue to "work closely with the French government and respect public institutions' focus on security, privacy, and digital trust."
The company stated it is "committed to offering customers more choice, enhanced data protection, and more resilient cloud services—ensuring data remains within Europe, compliant with European laws, and backed by robust security and privacy safeguards."
Zoom, Webex, and GoTo Meeting have not responded to requests for comment.
For years, French President Emmanuel Macron has championed the cause of digital sovereignty. Nick Lyne of Eurasia Group noted: "The political momentum behind the idea that we now need to de-risk from US tech has significantly strengthened."
"There is a palpable sense of a shift in the zeitgeist," Lyne said.
Last month at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, this topic became a central point of discussion among global political and business elites. Henna Virkkunen, the European Commissioner for technological sovereignty, told the audience that Europe's dependencies on other countries "could be weaponized against us."
"That is why, in critical areas of the economy and society, we cannot depend on a single country or a single company," she said, without naming specific nations or firms.
Last year, after the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued arrest warrants for Trump ally, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Trump administration sanctioned the court's chief prosecutor, Karim Khan—an event that proved to be a decisive turning point.
Reports indicated that the sanctions led Microsoft to deactivate Khan's ICC email account, a move that sparked concerns about a "kill switch" wielded by major tech companies, whereby they could arbitrarily terminate services.
Microsoft insisted that it maintained communication with the ICC throughout the process where "Microsoft services for sanctioned officials were disabled," and that "Microsoft never stopped or suspended services to the International Criminal Court."
Microsoft's press office stated that company President Brad Smith has repeatedly worked to strengthen transatlantic relations, citing his interview remarks in Davos last month where he said disputes over Greenland could impact employment, trade, investment, and security.
"Europe is the largest market for US tech after the domestic market. Everything depends on trust, and trust requires dialogue," Smith said.
Other events have further fueled this movement. There is a growing sentiment that the EU's repeated attempts to rein in tech giants like Google through massive antitrust fines and comprehensive digital regulations have not effectively curbed their dominance.
Billionaire Elon Musk is also a factor. Officials have expressed concern over Ukraine's reliance on his Starlink satellite internet system for communications.
Negotiations over US-EU data transfer protocols have been ongoing for years, dating back to whistleblower Edward Snowden's revelations of US cyber surveillance.
Now, with online services primarily hosted in the cloud via data centers, Europeans worry their data is vulnerable to attack.
In response, US cloud service providers have introduced so-called "sovereign cloud" offerings—data centers located in European countries, owned by European entities, and permitting physical and remote access only to employees who are EU residents.
Lyne explained that the core idea is that "only Europeans can make decisions, so they cannot be coerced by the US."
The German state of Schleswig-Holstein last year migrated 44,000 employees' email from Microsoft systems to an open-source email program, replaced Microsoft's SharePoint file-sharing system with the open-source platform Nextcloud, and is even considering replacing Windows with Linux and substituting traditional phone and video conferencing tools with open-source systems.
The state's Digitalization Minister Dirk Schrödter said in an October statement: "We want to break free from dependence on large tech companies and secure digital sovereignty."
The city of Lyon in France also announced last year that it would deploy free office software to replace Microsoft products. The Danish government, along with cities like Copenhagen and Aarhus, are already trialing open-source software.
Danish Digitalization Minister Caroline Stagh Ølsen wrote on LinkedIn last year: "We must not let ourselves become so dependent on a few [companies] that we cannot act freely. Currently, too much public digital infrastructure is tied to a very small number of foreign suppliers."
The Austrian military stated it has switched to the LibreOffice suite—software that includes word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation programs, functionally comparable to Microsoft 365's Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
Behind LibreOffice is the Germany-based non-profit The Document Foundation, which said the Austrian military's shift "reflects a growing market demand to break free from single-vendor dependence." Other reports indicated military concerns that Microsoft is moving file storage to the cloud, whereas LibreOffice's standard version is not cloud-based.
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