France’s Digital Independence Gamble

The French government recently announced that its officials will soon be required to use "Visio," a French-made video conferencing platform, instead of Zoom. The move, framed as an effort to "regain digital independence," epitomizes Europe’s misguided approach to technology. Rather than leveraging global expertise and comparative advantage, France is choosing an expensive, inefficient path that will ultimately harm its own interests while delivering an inferior product to its citizens and officials.

The decision flies in the face of basic economic principles that have underpinned global prosperity for generations. The theory of comparative advantage holds that countries should specialize in what they do best, allowing international trade to flourish and benefiting all parties. Americans happily buy French wine because France excels at winemaking. The French eagerly purchase iPhones because American companies lead in technology innovation. This mutual exchange has created wealth and improved lives on both sides of the Atlantic.

For decades, this theory worked reasonably well in practice, at least on the surface. However, President Trump identified a fundamental flaw in the so-called rules-based international order: it systematically disadvantaged America. Europe enjoyed largely tariff-free access to U.S. markets while maintaining significant barriers to American exports. The European Union routinely levied massive fines against American tech companies and dragged them through protracted legal battles. American diplomacy offered carrots, but there was no stick to end the unfair treatment.

Trump's tariffs, characterized as both reciprocal and retaliatory, aimed to level the playing field and provide American officials leverage against EU actions. While the tariff regime has faced criticism and adjustment challenges, it has benefited the U.S. Treasury and created a more equitable trading relationship. The French government's response, developing its own technology products as a counter to American tariffs, is remarkably short-sighted and demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of both economics and technology.

Consider first the naming of France's video conferencing solution: "Visio." One wonders whether the French government bothered to consult Microsoft, which owns the Visio trademark, a diagramming and vector graphics application the company acquired years ago and integrated into its Office suite. This oversight alone suggests a lack of sophistication in the venture.

More significantly, the technological challenge France faces is immense. For all the years Zoom has been available, the platform has performed with remarkable reliability. It seamlessly scales from intimate two-person meetings to massive webinars with ten thousand participants, maintaining crystal-clear audio and video quality throughout. The engineering excellence required to achieve this level of performance represents years of iteration, billions of dollars in investment, and the collective expertise of some of the world's best software engineers.

What is the likelihood that France's Visio will match Zoom's technological excellence? About the same as an Oklahoma winery producing a world-class Chardonnay. It's technically possible, but the odds are vanishingly small, and the investment required would be enormous compared to simply purchasing the proven, existing product.

Then there's the critical issue of network effects. Technology platforms derive much of their value from widespread adoption. Zoom succeeded precisely because the world uses it. Colleagues, clients, friends, and family members across continents can connect effortlessly because they're all on the same platform. Given language barriers and limited governmental reach, Visio's adoption will likely be confined to government agencies in France and perhaps a handful of other Francophone countries. This limited user base means there's no compelling business case for continuous innovation and improvement. Zoom invests heavily in maintaining its technological leadership because its global dominance depends on it. No such incentive exists for France’s Visio, which will serve a captive, mandated user base with little competitive pressure.

The inefficiency multiplies when you consider that France isn't alone in this quixotic quest. If every country develops its own video conferencing platform, users will need multiple applications to communicate with different audiences. France is also considering replacing WhatsApp with its own messaging tool called Tchap. Imagine the absurdity: government officials would need one app to message French colleagues, another for European partners, a third for American contacts, and so on. The result would be chaos, reduced productivity, and frustrated users.

This fragmentation undermines the very purpose of digital communication tools: to connect people seamlessly across borders. We've already seen this problem play out in messaging platforms, where users juggle WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, WeChat, and others. Extending this fragmentation to government-mandated platforms would create extraordinary inefficiencies and barriers to international cooperation.

The French are justifiably proud of their achievements in cuisine, fashion, culture, and many other domains. But even France cannot excel at everything. Someone needs to deliver this simple truth to the French government: building world-class technology platforms requires not just capital and will, but also the ecosystem, talent pool, and market dynamics that currently exist primarily in the United States and a few other tech hubs.

Rather than wasting taxpayer money on inferior domestic alternatives, France should focus its resources on areas where it genuinely excels. Let American companies provide the technology infrastructure while France invests in domains where it has true competitive advantages. This approach would better serve French citizens, strengthen the transatlantic alliance through mutual economic dependence, and demonstrate that France understands the economic principles it once championed.

Digital sovereignty is a worthy goal in data protection and privacy standards, areas where Europe has indeed led with initiatives such as the GDPR. But building inferior technology platforms in the name of independence is not sovereignty. It's folly dressed up as nationalism. The French government should reconsider this misguided path before it wastes billions on a vain, vanity project.

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