For years, the EU has been trying to regulate and stop the uncontrollable growth of U.S. and Chinese social media platforms and the reliance on their technology thanks to political interference, issues with how these algorithms are trained and used, and more recently due to the U.S. trying to take Greenland, as this echoed a new alarm on cybersecurity threats and the future of the EU-U.S. alliance. With that, it seems the region is finally taking its formal steps to change this pattern.
For example, France recently announced that it would replace Microsoft Teams and Zoom with Visio, a video conferencing platform created in the country that should be used by the government starting in 2027. The minister for the civil service and state reform of France, David Amiel, said this change is important to guarantee the “security and public electronic communications by relying on a powerful and sovereign tool.” With changes like this one that France is implementing, Europe would be responsible for what it thinks is the best way to regulate the internet and ensure users’ privacy.
EU is finally taking its digital sovereignty seriously now
Early this year, Europe created the Call for Evidence commission on open-source technology policy. With that, the European Parliament invited individuals, businesses, and the community in general to submit feedback on how it’s going to take on its digital sovereignty by reducing dependence on platforms controlled outside Europe, strengthening its digital infrastructure, and creating an innovation ecosystem.
The commission says it plans to introduce its final strategy in the first quarter of this year, as it wants to improve open source projects. Besides that, with the ongoing tension between Europe and the U.S., developers have been more vocal about their in-house software, including a European social media platform and other European software. Ultimately, it all depends on the willingness of governments to start making local deals, but also the population to move away from their most used social media apps, as people switched from X to Threads, AI agents, and technologies to some of the projects currently being made in Europe.
