Posted by AareyBaba 11 hours ago
What are they gonna switch to? I'll bet it ends up being a fork of Zoom or Teams. It's all just theater.
Just among my circle of friends there were two startups that made video conferencing systems. One generic, and one for uses that required a higher degree of security. If we move one stratum out, there are about half a dozen startups where friends of friends take part in developing smart cameras for video conferencing as well as industrial uses.
And then there was the Tandberg video conferencing platform which was acquired by Cisco in 2010. (That entire stack was designed and engineered in Norway. From low level DSPs to software).
There are dozens of companies that could make a video conferencing system in Europe today that would be no worse than what you find in Zoom, Teams etc. But since it is a crowded field, they haven't had the muscle to compete.
I’m guessing they will probably use something built on top of Matrix which is an open protocol maintained by a Community Interest Corporation (CIC) in the UK.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/30/france_matrix/
I’m less sure what they will use for video conferencing, but they could do worse then something built on top of WebRTC, which is also an open protocol maintained by W3C, an international standards organization with location in 4 countries (including France and USA).
Some clients use Jitsi, but I find it more complicated to run Jitsi in-house. BBB was really easy to setup.
Aynthing that doesn't terminate in USA where it will be used for industrial espionage by Trump, and cut off as soon as USA's regime finds it useful to do so -- like to prevent reporting of the invasion of Greenland, say. European governments are using Microsoft, that's just not safe with MS paying fealty (and literally paying in $dollars) to a fascist regime.
It is unconscionable to maintain the status quo of using USA-based service companies.
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.
Would you like for me to start counting the number of times the US helped install a democracy vs the number of times it installed dictatorships?
What you said doesn’t discount that we are better with free democracies, regardless of whether we see that through. Democracies tend to raise the per capita income across the population, which, in concert with free markets, gives our multinational corporations new markets to sell shit to.
Sometimes we have other more pressing concerns, like oil in Iran/Iraq (a democracy destroyed and created, respectively); global shipping / colonialism in our support of Israel in conflicts with Egypt over the Suez; abandoning our Kurdish allies to keep Turkey happy enough to keep military assets there.
Geopolitics doesn’t always do one thing or another, even if it were perfectly rational. And no foreign policy is that.
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2023/06/27/international-...
People globally have routinely acknowledged that:
1. The US is a hegemony that meddles in others’ affairs
2. It does so selfishly, despite the high flying rhetoric about freedom, democracy, etc.
3. This is good
The preconditions for absence of war in Europe came before the EU existed and has to do with the post-WWII balance of power, which was heavily driven by the United States.
I’m not at all suggesting that the United States’s history isn’t fucked. I would suggest, though, that many people recognize that there are tradeoffs and having a single global superpower provides stability in exchange for freedom.
Yes, I’m aware of our history overturning democracies in South America or south east Asia due to communism or Iran because of oil. I’m also aware of efforts to install democracies (e.g. Iraq) not being about freedom. The people polled understand this as well.
I’m curious which counter factual reality you think would be better? Be specific as to what it would look like; who the regional powers would be; how they would cooperate / interfere with each other; what wars would look like, including frequency, between regional powers vs. today; whether states within their sphere of influence would be required to participate in these wars, etc etc etc.
France wants to really really reallllllyyyy believe they do.
Poland and Germany lets France say such fanciful words, but they keep their actual thoughts for themselves. They know France has an Adler inferiority complex, so they let them pretend.