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Posted by AareyBaba 7 hours ago

France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US(apnews.com)
606 points | 351 commentspage 2
hvb2 6 hours ago|
Conversation a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46767668
Waterluvian 3 hours ago||
I think this is one of the silver linings to this new era. By trying to renegotiate intolerable terms, the Americans are forcing the rest of the world to figure out how to make it all work without them. This will inevitably be a rough transition but it results in more worldwide resiliency and product/service options.

I think one question, which we might be seeing a bit here and there, is if the Americans decide that no, you can’t also do that. You must accept the intolerable terms or be punished.

jt2190 6 hours 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.
jl6 5 hours ago|
Ahhh, collaboration via Visio. Those were the days!
BurningFrog 6 hours ago||
Note that this is only about European governments choosing to not use US software.
ezst 6 hours 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.
DaSHacka 3 hours ago||
Is this true though? There are tons of policies and procedures the US government has required for decades that never got adopted by the private sector.
snowpid 2 hours ago||
OS will be cheaper. No monopoly rendite + development across more shoulders.
melesian 6 hours ago|||
You can be very sure that millions of Europeans and large numbers of businesses are finding alternatives.
PlatoIsADisease 5 minutes ago|||
I was going to say 'No way, profit > idealistic moral virtues'. But I could totally see Europe knee capping themselves. Look at how their food is inferior to the US because they stick to tradition.

I can totally see themselves doing this out of pride/humiliation.

DaSHacka 3 hours ago|||
Can we? Do you have any numbers to back this up?
johanyc 1 hour ago||
Not direct numbers. But you can see r/BuyFromEU has 795K Weekly visitors. That is A LOT. In comparison, r/OpenAI has 676K Weekly visitors and r/webdev has 691K Weekly visitors.
alamortsubite 4 hours ago||
Yes, and it's clear European governments are just catching up to the sentiment of European people.
jgbuddy 6 hours ago||
It's all fun and games until there's an outage, nothing screams efficient like a state-owned tech company
guywithahat 5 hours ago||
Oh wow how did I not know it was state owned! The article keeps referring to "sovereign tech" which I assumed meant sovereign tech companies. I'm all for hating on teams (and sharepoint) but a state owned tech company sounds like an apocalyptically bad idea, and since it's state owned it can't really migrate to other industries/countries, and they likely won't update as quickly as they should as new technologies come around. I get the sharepoint/teams hate but I'm surprised a startup form isn't making more fun of France for this
NicuCalcea 4 hours ago||
The first sentence of the article:

> In France, civil servants will ditch Zoom and Teams for a homegrown video conference system.

I don't see an issue with government workers using government software. They are not licencing it to businesses or consumers, although with it being open source, I'm sure some will use it.

guywithahat 3 hours ago||
To me "homegrown video conference system" would mean like made in France by a French company, not made by the French government. I could be wrong but chat systems seem dynamic and important enough I wouldn't want it to be run and managed by the government. It will be interesting to see how it pans out though, and it's always nice to have more open source code
runarberg 5 hours ago||
Most of Europe did just fine with state owned telecommunication companies which lasted well into the 1990s or even the 2000s. To this day some of the largest telecommunications companies in Europe are still state owned, partially, and in some cases in full.

Growing up in Iceland where we had a state monopoly on telecommunications until the late 90s, I don‘t remember a single telecommunication outage. In fact, after moving to America where I have a private internet provider, I have experience quite a few internet blackouts actually.

ReptileMan 4 hours ago||
>Most of Europe did just fine with state owned telecommunication companies which lasted well into the 1990s or even the 2000s.

Early 2000s were the times when 50Mbit in Eastern Europe when it was the wild west cost 10eur/month through lan cable and in Western Europe ADSL and ISDN cost multitude of the cost for fraction of the speed.

runarberg 4 hours ago||
Early 2000s is exactly the time period when telecommunications companies in Europe were well on their way to privatization, if not already fully privatized.

You are proving my point.

ReptileMan 4 hours ago||
Yes. And the result was shitty speeds on state telecoms and extremely fast in the deregulated market.
esel2k 4 hours ago||
Working for a large business in Europe- I think MSFT and Google co know exactly about the threat to their business.

Thats why the aggressively integrate every AI tool where they can - like copilot to make large companies and government stick to their solutions. I wish government will find am even better way to embed LLM to their tools…

whatever1 3 hours ago||
If they also make US copyright not enforceable then they can have office clones and then it’s game over.
richardw 4 hours ago||
Great. There’s no reason why all countries don’t start preferring locally or regionally developed software. Of course interoperability is always a thing but there needs to be another option between “one company” and “everyone host your own instance”.
lagniappe 2 hours ago||
How many times are we going to see this same exact topic posted?
atonse 4 hours ago|
I couldn't tell from the article but any reason they wouldn't just adopt Matrix? I thought some European governments (especially in France) were already adopting Matrix.
Arathorn 3 hours ago|
France was one of the first to already adopt Matrix. However, when they began Visio, Element was embedding Jitsi for VoIP. Meanwhile Element built Element Call, which is somewhat similar to Visio (except E2EE and decentralised thanks to Matrix). Hopefully the two can converge :)
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