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

https://apnews.com/article/europe-digital-sovereignty-big-tech-9f5388b68a0648514cebc8d92f682060
151•AareyBaba•1h ago

Comments

pelagicAustral•41m ago
Refreshing. No more Teams? Sounds like a dream... Of all the crapware I am forced to work with, Teams really pushes the envelope in every single negative way conceivable. I think I have more love for SharePoint than Teams, and that is a massive concession.
Banditoz•34m ago
Every Teams team is backed by SharePoint, unfortunately.
muwtyhg•3m ago
And every private channel as well. And if you rename the Team, the SharePoint will become out-of-sync and all URLs will still use the old Team name.
macspoofing•17m ago
It's not that bad. It's well integrated into Sharepoint, Exchange, and Office, and does the job. I've used both Slack and Teams and if you're using MS365, then Teams is absolutely the better option.
clhodapp•15m ago
For many of us, you are describing a black hole of integrated nightmare software
sigmoid10•5m ago
As someone who has gone from Slack in startups to Teams in big corpo, I disagree. Teams won't even display all office file formats without you having to open the dedicated app. And if it does it's usually a half-baked mess. And don't even get me started on the UX or meeting options or mobile support or the complete lack of a dedicated Linux client. I don't need one app to do everything half-assed, I need one app that does exactly what it's meant for well. Preferably on every platform.
boringg•3m ago
It is 100% that bad.
soco•1m ago
Okay and what exactly does this integration bring? - opening Sharepoint pages in Teams' half-baked browser; - opening Word or Excel in Teams' own half-baked editor; - Exchange integration is the calendar, period. Nothing else. The only thing actually usable. Am I missing anything?
boringg•4m ago
I couldn't agree more with this. Teams somehow managed to supercede my other microphone preferences when I'm not even using teams (took me a while to figure out). It might be one of the apps I detest the most. There is very little satisfaction with it and much annoyance.
spicyusername•39m ago
Such a shame that so many U.S. citizens do not see the ramifications of their political decisions.

Each one of these actions is a stepping stone the world is taking as a direct consequence of U.S. political negligence. And however difficult it was to render this consequence, it will be tenfold, or hundredfold, as difficult to reverse course.

iancmceachern•35m ago
Many of us see them and are fighting the fight if our lives against it
wrqvrwvq•22m ago
The US has openly spied on nato allies via msft for decades, and this was widely reported long before Snowden. All us tech is a tool of government surveillance and has always been. msft has also been repeatedly sued and sanctioned for corruption and bribery and coercive practices across europe over the past two decades. The fact that europe views trump as the threat but not the system he represents is cynical but the move towards autonomy is long past due. aws and msft etc all get away with overcharging for often terrible services is largely due to a lack of viable competition. europe has had great open-source offering for many years, but has "strategically" starved all of them of funding and credibility. This is as much a result of eu scleroticism as it is msft's bullying and anti-competitive practices. If trump makes it easier for them to get their act together it is to his credit.
mesk•30m ago
Being Great doesnt comes with Best to Live with, Best to Work with, Best to make Business with etc...

US will be Great like all Giants are - terrifying and alone ;-)

burningChrome•29m ago
>>> Such a shame that so many U.S. citizens do not see the ramifications of their political decisions.

Most US Citizens are not voting on what you think they're voting on. Most are worried about things that affect their day-to-day life like cost of eggs, the cost of gas, taxes going up, my 401K going in the dumpster.

I live and breathe tech everyday. I see the dangers of it all around me. Day in and day out. You try and talk to people about how dangerous some of this stuff is. Unless people feel it somehow like having their identity stolen and they spend three years trying to fix it all? Nothing will ever change.

People are 100% immune to this stuff now. Its the old frog in boiler water analogy.

toomuchtodo•27m ago
Well, that's the problem, these people are wildly uneducated and unsophisticated. They are voting their feelings. Prices levels do not come down without a depression, even if inflation slows. Their only solution is wages going up. Do they have a mechanism to push wages up? Taxes must go up, they have been too low for too long and the debt has accumulated (~$38T in US treasuries alone) and will need to be paid back or defaulted on. Insurance costs continue to rise due to rapidly increasing costs of materials and labor, as well as climate change (the US is currently spending ~$1B/year on climate driven events). Growth is over because the US population is not growing (tangentially, total fertility rate is below replacement rate in more than half of countries in the world, and this trend will continue). 401ks predicated on the S&P500 are held up by AI investment (which is outpacing consumer spending, the primary driver of the US economy, over the last year to the tune of ~$400B) and the Mag 7. When this stalls, everyone is going to be sad and not feel as wealthy as they did previously.

Happiness is reality minus expectations, and the future is not going to be as good as the past. Everything is downstream of that. The vibes might be bad, but they ain't gonna get better.

Financial Times: The consumer sentiment puzzle deepens - https://www.ft.com/content/f3edc83f-1fd0-4d65-b773-89bec9043... | https://archive.today/nFlfY - February 3rd, 2026

(some component of price increases has been predatory monopoly gouging covered extensively by Matt Stoller on his newsletter https://www.thebignewsletter.com/, but for our purposes, we can assume this admin isn't going to impair that component of price levels and inflation with regulation for the next 3 years)

xienze•3m ago
> Well, that's the problem, these people are wildly uneducated and unsophisticated.

Simple solution, limit voting to college-educated landowners? Or maybe we should just do away with the whole voting thing and let Democrats just do whatever they want. They know what's best for us, after all.

lotsofpulp•24m ago
> Most are worried about things that affect their day-to-day life like cost of eggs, the cost of gas, taxes going up, my 401K going in the dumpster.

Are they? It seems to me like they’re worried about things like women having access to too much healthcare, too many non white people, and too many women leaders. They voted for a guy that wants to make the most expensive purchase of most people’s lives even more expensive:

https://youtu.be/ToJxd3HBviE

Not to mention the enormous tax increases by way of getting rid of the expanded ACA premium credits.

badc0ffee•14m ago
Talk to actual Trump voters and you'll see they support his tariffs and immigration crackdowns because they believe it will lead to economic prosperity and good jobs returning to their community. They believe the current system is fundamentally unfair to them. Even though that's totally backwards, and Trump is just making everything worse, that's what they believe.

Framing immigration reform as "racists think there are too many non white people" is what costs Democrats elections.

lotsofpulp•3m ago
I prefer to live by the adage that actions speak louder than words. I’m capable of lying to present a facade, and I have to assume others are too.
emsign•6m ago
> Most US Citizens are not voting on what you think they're voting on. Most are worried about things that affect their day-to-day life like cost of eggs, the cost of gas, taxes going up, my 401K going in the dumpster.

Haha, oh no no! Apparently they don't vote for those things either. I mean maybe now that they are actually made to feel the consequences of their own votes in 2024 some of the Republicans have changed their minds.

Yet after looking at the polls I feel my thesis confirmed that in their personal cost benefit analysis these personal sacrifices are worth it because Trump does deliver on his racist policies he promised. Republicans are so racist and sexist, that they are willing to pay the price as long as the people they hate are made to suffer more than them. You can downvote me but I know it's true. The USA has a racist white culture, maybe not in the cities but in the rural areas, and it's so unhinged that more and more countries, companies and people around the world just don't want to have anything to do with the USA anymore. Me included. The USA is not an ally anymore towards me and my country, it behaves like an enemy. And the root cause is racism.

bryanrasmussen•21m ago
I mean this is essentially the same situation anyone is in when they have vendor lock in, they know it's a problem, but it is always just not worth it to get out, only this vendor lock in is all vendors from a country lock in and now it is not just worth it but imperative, absolutely necessary.

And of course once you have gotten out of vendor lock in, you never go back. If you do go back to that vendor that locked you in before, because of some sweetheart deal, you make sure to set up all sorts of escape hatches so if you need to bounce quickly you can.

The vendor lock in of the EU to the US for so many things is being dismantled.

giantg2•19m ago
How someone voted has almost no bearing on the dangers of tech. The dangers were there before the last election and none of the candidates had strong positions regarding tech privacy. Microsoft would still be doing what it has been doing regardless of the election outcome. I wouldnt hold my breath that a European Teams/Zoom replacement will have robust encryption and privacy protection based on all the backdoor stuff I've heard being pushed in some European countries.
lenerdenator•17m ago
1) Most US citizens don't care for what's happening right now. That's why there's people protesting while armed in major cities.

2) Continental Europe has shown a willingness to continue dependency on other countries in the face of far, far worse national behavior. NordStream 2 planned after the invasion of Georgia and was still under construction after Putin had invaded and annexed Crimea. Not "threatened" to do so, he had actually done it. There was a body count involved. So it's not too far off-base to think that despite all of the foolishness from the Trump administration, the US could seek some slack for its technology sector. It's not like you need Teams to keep your factories running and to avoid freezing to death in the winter, but that was the sort of integration with the Russians that Europeans were seeking to maintain while Putin was redrawing the map, at least until the Ukraine invasion, and even then, it took clandestine activity to permanently take NordStream offline.

People like Trump will almost certainly point at this and say that this shows Europeans to be allies of convenience, not true partners. People like him love to cry about double standards.

hvb2•39m ago
Conversation a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46767668
clot27•33m ago
so is there any open source alternative to these meeting apps? (selfhostable)
arm32•33m ago
I guess Jitsi?
MengerSponge•31m ago
Jitsi? https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet
philipwhiuk•27m ago
https://www.rocket.chat/
Etheryte•19m ago
We used to run this back in the day which, granted, was quite a long time ago now. I don't think we ever went longer than a few months without a serious outage of sorts, and that certainly wasn't for a lack of resources or manpower.
gilney•3m ago
The Jitsi site says rocket.chat uses it.
saubeidl•25m ago
The French government built their own: https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet
fpoling•17m ago
But they hosted the repo on Microsoft-run GitHub ...
saubeidl•13m ago
The public-facing mirror :-)
euio757•17m ago
"built their own" wrapper yes (which is a very important piece of a end-to-end Zoom like product)

But you can see:

> Powered by [LiveKit](https://livekit.io/)

Fine since this is an open source product, but not full EU sovereignty of the software stack.

Livekit could at any time change their license and drop support for the free open-source version like so many products have done in the past.

If a EU entity forks it and maintains it, then that'd be end-to-end sovereignty IMO.

wongarsu•24m ago
For Teams-like chat I really like Zulip. Which also integrates with Jitsi for video conferencing

If you are hosting webinars there's also bigbluebutton

rectang•20m ago
It's not open source, but up until a few years ago I used whereby.com for videochats.

Unlike the alternatives at the time from Google, Apple, etc., it didn't require an account for participants — I could just give them the meeting room URL. So although it wasn't open source, it at least didn't lock you into a network.

(Unlike you, I wasn't up for self-hosting.)

kofu•10m ago
This one is often overlook but very good, I prefer it over Jitsi https://galene.org/
j_maffe•31m ago
Honest to god, everything that Trump is doing might actually end up being that the world becomes a better place. The US hegemony really ran its course.
tyre•16m ago
The US hegemony has been a tremendous boon to the world. Yes, the US has done terrible things (lots in South America, Vietnam, genocide in East Timor, failed nation building and war crimes in the Middle East, support for genocide in Palestine, etc.) This isn’t to minimize that.

But the reality is that the US benefits immensely from free democracies with rules-based open markets and international order. Again, do we break that when it suits us? Absolutely. But America being selfish has been a positive outcome compared to, for example, more war in Europe.

Polls consistently show that people recognize the benefits of US hegemony while acknowledging that the US does it purely from self-interest.

melesian•4m ago
The absence of war in Europe is more down to the EU than the US. Polls do not consistently show anything of the sort.
pcj-github•29m ago
Good for them! As a US citizen, I am trying to do the same. Closing my gmail account and moving to ProtonMail.
BurningFrog•22m ago
Note that this is only about European governments choosing to not use US software.
ezst•7m ago
Yeah, and once the precedent is settled, you can bet that the private sector will follow, and give birth to a bunch of local service companies to deploy and support those solutions in an healthier and fairer manner than the current GSuite/MSOffice duopoly.
melesian•2m ago
You can be very sure that millions of Europeans and large numbers of businesses are finding alternatives.
lencastre•21m ago
it’s gotta be too good to be true, but at least one major economy taking the lead, imagine
tyre•20m ago
As an American, this is awesome to see.

We should pay penalties for our abandonment of good faith global engagement. And economic damage really is the key to the heart of these United States of Three Corporations in a Trench Coat.

We’ve seen companies and CEOs paying millions in bribes to be close to the president. Now this aligns their financial interests with shifting our foreign policy. Not how it ought to work, but it’s the world we have.

Brian_K_White•20m ago
I would not have predicted that my country's government going bad would have such a positive side-effect on the world of software and network services.
rayiner•18m ago
In favor of what? I’m all for economic nationalism, but you have to have competitive home grown alternatives. Does Europe have them? Or are they going to shoot themselves in the foot productivity-wise by boycotting the best products?
atherton94027•11m ago
The best products like Microsoft Teams? Let's be honest, a lot of the software they've replaced has a checkered past
999900000999•17m ago
Good. Open source solutions exist and need investment.

Hopefully the EU as a whole can rally behind this.

firefoxd•17m ago
After an acquisition, we are transitioning from google meet and slack, to Teams. I used to hate slack so much with their random features popping left and right and menus moving around. Oh I didn't know how good we had it.

Slack is a delight compared to Teams. And I'm not even alone in this, everyone is still using slack until it gets pried off our hands. So help me God anyone mentions Copilot one more time...

lenerdenator•16m ago
If only they'd taken the same approach with Russian natural gas in 2008.
stopbulying•16m ago
Are those US software firms still obligated to comply with EU restrictions and legal demands if they are banned/barred/fascisticly_denied_the_option_to_compete by one or more EU territories?
stopbulying•10m ago
Isn't it reasonable to block access to countries that deny you the option to compete and copy your business?

Then you'll need to pay for a VPN.

larsnystrom•15m ago
There seems to be a huge business opportunity in Europe right now, to sell support and customization of open source software to government players. Has anyone heard about a European company that’s been successful in this area?
pstuart•13m ago
Yeah, this is a win/win opportunity and could drive more sponsorship of those projects as there'd be more interests invested in seeing them thrive.
pkulak•4m ago
Matrix has done a bunch of work with the French government in the past. Hopefully they can capitalize on this sentiment.
jt2190•13m ago
> The French government… announced last week that 2.5 million civil servants would stop using video conference tools from U.S. providers — including Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Webex and GoTo Meeting — by 2027 and switch to Visio, a homegrown service.
jgbuddy•13m ago
It's all fun and games until there's an outage, nothing screams efficient like a state-owned tech company
lefstathiou•10m ago
As an American, I will echo Trump's speech at Davos. We want strong allies, not vassals. Be capable of building your own EVs, your own rockets, your own fighter jets, your own subway systems, your own zoom alternatives, your own search engines, your own operating systems, etc etc.

Make Europe great again. Bring back creativity. Bring back jobs. Build a talented workforce that stays local instead of migrating to the US. Be independent. Stand tall. Do all of these things and preferrably do them now.

America and China's rise shouldnt be zero sum. It should lift the world. Europe forged the path we all follow. Come back to it.

ChrisArchitect•10m ago
[dupe] Discussion from a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46767668
FpUser•5m ago
Long time overdue. It is so stupid to rely on a single country in so many areas
wateralien•2m ago
Almost all businesses need email, contacts, calendars, live chat, video calls, docs, sheets, and presentations. Ideally all linked. Where is the open source foundation for this package that everyone needs?

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