France to ban officials from US video tools including Zoom, Teams

https://www.politico.eu/article/france-ban-officials-us-video-tools-zoom-teams-visio/

29 Comments

  1. supercyberlurker on

    Regardless of how you feel about it – we are moving into a world where US software is not trusted.

    The implications of that are just *starting.*

  2. Competitive-Yak-3785 on

    We need to be bankrupted, to be honest. This whole system where we’re ruled by corporations is killing the American people. We need a reset. Yes, please use other companies for everything. US corporations need to go bankrupt and we need to start over.

  3. devilishycleverchap on

    FBI is going to find out about how much access anti cheat gives and start subpoenaed gaming companies

  4. Frankly restricting communications tools to only those run on government infrastructure with audited software has always been the only sane and safe way to run sensitive government communications channels, regardless of how much of a loose cannon the US is right now.

    It’s a little crazy how complacent even powerful countries like France have grown under Pax Americana.

  5. The French government is moving all of their employees over to their homegrown suite of products. FTA:

    >France [last summer](https://pro.politico.eu/news/202736) mandated that officials get off WhatsApp and Telegram and instead use Tchap, an instant messaging service designed exclusively for civil servants.

    This is part of that transition, not a sudden change in response to current events.

  6. The title is misleading. France wants to ban US video tools only for public administrations exchanges for now.
    But yeah I think this is a good move given the current situation, and I would be happy to see other private corporations moving away from the hot garbage that Teams is.

  7. My only question is how viable the alternative is

    Fine get rid of teams and zoom… but replaced by Visio?

    It is hard enough getting permissions to share video and documents through outlook and teams via Microsoft already even within a company internally

    Can only imagine the pain and backwards dealings this will lead to because some manager is unable to allow his employee to download a document because “America and Microsoft” or whatever

  8. No one should use Teams. We can advocate for violence against a software package, can’t we?

    I would sign up to put the virtual bullet into the virtual skull of that senile, doddering corpse of a software package.

  9. Banning Zoom and Teams from officials is nothing. I want to see Europe getting rid of AWS and Azure then we’re talking.

  10. aza-industries on

    Teams 🤮
    Force crappy products through interoperability in house while restricting feature rich alternatives.

    Too bad learning how to use a new UI seems to be a skill a lot of people fear exercising. 

    US software doesn’t understand competition and is loosing ground to user driven applications. 

    They’ll keep trying to make standard features available for decades a subscription and act like we don’t know what our own hardware is capable of without relying on their “services”. 

  11. Get off your ass Europe and develop alternatives, goddammit. I would LOVE to get rid of all American tech that is an nothing more than a collection of insane spying tools and instruments of manipulation the billionaires use to brainwash the masses.  

    I would love products where your privacy laws and digital rights are automatically built in from the start.  

    You have a golden opportunity right now to seize.  Grab the bull by the horns and start taking advantage.

  12. Heavy_Milk2757 on

    Very wise, considering the US is putting French judges on international watch-lists for not bending the knee to their corruption.

  13. Welp. This is how we know the US Europe split is pretty much a done deal.

    And if the tech giants think that they call lobby the US government to pressure the Europe, I think they will quickly discover that they will now have to play by the same rules as everybody else because US pressure and influence won’t have nearly the same effect as it used to.

  14. Makes sense. Many countries have done that with China and others when they have proved untrustworthy.

    The US has no doubt been using US made tools for snooping, but up until recently hopefully used it for good, and peace.

    Very low odds of any such snooping being used for anything other than the immediate needs of orange one’s ego.

    So yeah, more power to them.