Khaberni - The French government has decided to prohibit public officials from using American video conferencing platforms, such as Google Meet, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams, in official work meetings.
This decision is part of a broader plan to transition government activities to domestically developed technology platforms, amid growing European sensitivity about dependency and deep reliance on American digital services.
According to a spokesperson for the magazine "Politico", the Prime Minister’s Office has prepared a notification that mandates state employees to use "Visio" (Visio), a video conferencing software developed by the country's inter-ministerial digital agency (Dinum), which operates on infrastructure provided by the French company "Outscale".
The official notification that mandates this transition is set to be published "in the next few days", according to a spokesperson for the digital agency (Dinum). This measure comes after the announcement by the Minister of Government Reform, David Amiel, that France aims to fully adopt a domestically made video conferencing platform by 2027.
This step is an extension of the sovereign digitization policy that Paris follows, as it imposed last summer on officials to stop using messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram, and instead switch to using "Tchap", a messaging service exclusively designed for the French civil service.
The "Visio" program is already used by about 40,000 government employees, including most ministries and some affiliated institutions such as the French National Center for Scientific Research. The digital agency (Dinum) aims to expand its use to include 250,000 users in the public sector.
To ensure compliance with the new decision, the administration will monitor the transition, and may block – in the coming months – data flows coming from other video tools across the government network.
