Digital relocation

Our digital dependence on the United States is extreme. It is urgent to anchor digital relocation inside our reindustrialization plans.

publié le 12 février 2025, mis à jour 13 février 2025

🇫🇷  Cet article est aussi disponible en français

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A year ago, we launched the "Cartes" project: creating an open and eco-friendly digital map , built in France. Since then, Trump has been re-elected rather than imprisoned. Musk greatly helped him by making his personality, our naivety, his fortune, and his acquisition of Twitter decisive electoral weapons targeting the failing American democracy.

Then he gave a Nazi salute during the inauguration ceremony of the most powerful president in the world, before starting a proactive power grab that looks very much like a coup d'état.

The CEO of Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) has embraced Trump's ultra-conservative politics. The other GAFAM [in France, US Big Tech companies are called GAFAM : Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft] companies have docilely fallen in line as first-level constituents of this new plutocratic bloc. Even the Swedish Spotify, a second-level digital giant, has pledged allegiance to the president of this country on the path to fascism.

In France, the cables of this foreign interference tool called X that Musk uses to elect far-right parties in Europe have still not been cut. It is not hard to understand why: the overwhelming majority of our politicians are still hyper-active on it, as shows our joint X activity analysis project, both on the right and more surprinsigly, on the left.

For these members of the so-called French "republican front" 200,000 followers (a significant portion of which are bots) are definitely worth more than a boycott of the most powerful far-right media where their voice weighs less than a grimace on Pascal Praud's show [the most infamous French far-right TV's plateau].

State of our digital offshoring

As the American democracy is being unraveled, perhaps we do not realize the moral, geopolitical, political, ecological, economic, and digital shock that is happening. It is the latter that we will focus on here.

Perhaps, on the contrary, we fully realize it, but our geopolitical survival reflexes have not yet been triggered.

In 2020, the Covid crisis in France highlighted the need for reindustrialization. The inability to produce something as basic as a face mask or essential medicines was a wake-up call.

We must understand that the same applies to the most basic digital services that pace our modern life. Every day, how many calls do we make to Uncle Sam's servers?

Could We Withstand a Digital Embargo?

Have you started counting? Good luck. In particular, we do not have a single European search engine worthy of this name. Ecosia, Qwant [Qwant was supposed to become the French Google], Lilo, and others are all just paint on the two ultra-dominant web indexes, Google and Bing.

Our digital hardware is also entirely dependent on foreign interests, starting with our smartphones: no smartphones made in France, despite the 2022 announcements.

We know how to make "made in France" panties at €60 a piece [France has a well-kown premium brand called "Le slip français"], but not the object that we use 500 times a day. We also do not have a mobile software system, with Android and iOS having destroyed all competition. As a result, we have no leverage over the social issues that smartphones cause.

A beneficial digital degrowth?

There is no need to spill much digital ink to bring to front the need to scroll through our social media wall every half hour. To send ephemeral funny photos to our friends. To order the latest trinket for €2.68 on Shein. To use digital maps instead of asking passersby for directions to the neighborhood boulangerie.

But this is a false dilemma: our daily digital "wandering" dependence is insidiously found in the uses of so many professions that, cut off from these American digital services, would collapse. Our hospitals depend on Microsoft, and more specifically on the Irish tax evasion subsidiary of the M in GAFAM. Our health data is hosted by Microsoft.

Our daily "leisure" uses are the tip of the iceberg of our foreign digital dependence.

The 2025 bug

SNCF, the French historic railway company which operates 99% of train journeys (the ideology of competition having never shaken the reality of the natural monopoly), has migrated to AWS, the cloud subsidiary of one of the two A's in GAFAM. Its managers are very proud of this. No more Amazon? No more TGV trips.

Let's hope that only the reservation system would be down, not the train stations and the national rail network.

Hundreds of thousands of executives, including civil servants, voluntarily connect their professional email to Gmail because they consider themselves dependent on the fluidity of its interface, giving the G in GAFAM access to each of the organization's strategic considerations.

How many essential professions, including emergency or security services, have their vehicle connected to Google Maps or Waze (a Google subsidiary) on every trip? How many non-profit local associations have built their entire external communication on Facebook and internal communication on WhatsApp, owned by the F in GAFAM?

At the top of the State, Emmanuel Macron himself used Telegram during his first term, without it seeming to shock enough internally and within his party. Until the DINUM [the French National Digital Department] intervened.

We are paying for decades of underinvestment

It is obvious that for the SNCF rail operator, using AWS is a short-term gain. Their monthly bill must be high, but not as high as a €1 billion digital fiasco offered by a "Digital Service Company", these French generic tech giants that often swallow immense sums by surfing on the digital illiteracy of clients who do not know how to differentiate a static blog from a complex and expensive application, and who have never understood that you can create a logo using Inkscape in a few hours rather than spending €200,000.

Offshoring the production of masks was also a very profitable operation in the short term, but with catastrophic consequences amounting to thousands of deaths during the first health crisis.

Perhaps we are currently experiencing the same moment for digital technology. We can imagine the heated debates currently taking place in the DSI [French big companies's IT Department] : some finding the idea of signing a multi-million euro deal with an American giant subject to Trump, scandalous; others paralyzed by the idea of starting over, finding it not very "pragmatic."

And others, let's not forget them, in agreement with the ideals of the American far-right, these self-proclaimed "patriots" quick to sell our sovereignty to the dictator who fascinates them the most.

The end of free octet circulation?

Relocating our digital technology seems physically less interesting than the rest of the industry. Because packets of octets cross oceans in a few milliseconds and never get stuck there as ships sometimes do.

Yet these information highways that are undersea cables can be cut, as shown by the "hybrid war," now openly called the undersea cold war, in the Baltic Sea.

A loss of wired and cellular networks can destabilize an entire region, as gravely illustrated by the Finnish series Conflict.

Cutting octets ? Better corrupt them

Yet these cuts are an opportunity to show the resilience of the internet, incomparable to the fragility of hydrocarbon pipelines.

Another primary national interest is incredibly more fragile than the internet: our democracies. The recurring debates on banning TikTok, notably for election interference as was proven in Romania during the 2024 presidential elections. This is what should alert us: the use of digital platforms as geopolitical weapons.

Prospective exercise: June 2025, Trump amasses the US Navy in the waters south of Greenland. What do Denmark, the United Kingdom, and the European Union do?

Reject the thought reflex "he would never do that," just as we should have done before China launched its military pressure exercises on Taiwan, and especially before Putin invaded Ukraine, before North Korea got involved in the invasion of Europe, before Musk gave a Nazi salute, or before the Trump-Netanyahu duo expressed their desire to empty Gaza of its inhabitants. No, think about the consequences as if it were a done deal.

Do you think Trump and his generals are stupid enough to ignore that their GAFAM companies run the economy, or even the French and European armies? Of course not.

GAFAM dominance is nuclear deterrence

Their control over our information systems is an atomic weapon: it allows them to deter any opposition. Like the bomb, its use would have difficult-to-imagine consequences.

We are all used to think of a nuclear accident as the single worst attack on a country. We are wrong: an electrical blackout is just as fearsome. What would be the consequences of a digital paralysis of a large part of our hospitals and emergency services?

"We made the mistake of relying on Putin's fossil gas. We are making the mistake today of relying on Trump's digital technologies. If he decided to cut us off from Google and Microsoft technologies, we would be forced to go back to paper directories," said the director of Ecosia in January in this article where we learn that Qwant was endangered when Bing decided two years ago to significantly increase its costs.

Patted on the back

The perfection of GAFAM user interfaces, their speed, their weekly innovations, their addiction mechanisms beautifully designed by the best designers in the world are irresistible: the French have a very good image of GAFAM (with the notable exception of Facebook). We have all benefited for 20 years from free access to extremely costly services. Free on the surface, of course: we pay for it through advertising, and above all, the loss of digital sovereignty.

But like a nuclear attack, deterrence works the other way: the threat accomplished, other countries' trust in GAFAM would collapse overnight. Their stock market valuation would plummet, because limited to the domestic market of the United States, Google and Facebook would divide their number of users and therefore their revenue and influence by 10.

Given their place in the S&P 500, the American financial shock would be immense. Google without international trust is just an American Qwant.

How to relocate our digital technology?

It is customary in France to take pleasure in ridiculing our digital services. We stand out with a kind of reverse chauvinism. Anything that is not foreign quickly risks being labeled as outdated. Deezer has no significant functional difference from Spotify, but losing the French domestic market, it was bought by a Russian-American consortium.

Instagram is a basic application that can be easily recoded, but who can compete with the attraction of the trendy Californian that now has a common word for itself, "insta" ? For every criticism of GAFAM services, the French digital design community will make 10 about SNCF-Connect [the French rail giant's booking application]. Because it has three unforgivable flaws: it is French, it has "SNCF" in its name, and it is not private.

Yet, France is full of talent in the digital world. The French are at the heart of the design of the best global LLMs that compete with ChatGPT. The doers are present, all that remains is the will to mobilize them, to trust them.

No successful digital application has been built by men in suits in a "project management" office piloting digital service company managers piloting consultants with so-called "sunflower" human turnover. None.

A change in mindset of citizens and leaders is a prerequisite for rebuilding European sovereignty.

The boost from public authorities

Note that the French administration is making numerous efforts in this regard, by deploying the sovereign encrypted messaging service Matrix or by creating its digital suite, a clear response to the complete Gmail enterprise offer. In the private sector, actors like the Swiss Infomaniak or the French Zaclys do not have the budget or the marketing megaphone of Google, but already a part of its talent.

The President of the Republic no longer uses Telegram and has forced the person in charge of this messaging service to stop turning a blind eye to slave trafficking in the Middle East (see this Le Monde investigation: warning, its content is very hard to stomach).

These initiatives are only a continuation of the launch in 2017 of the beta.gouv.fr program, itself driven by the arrival of open-source software within the administration confirmed by the foundational "Law for a Digital Republic" passed in 2016.

Digital relocation, a dark national retreat?

One of the possible ways to free ourselves from GAFAM is indeed to favor national private interests. France does not lack powerful private computer companies: Dassault Systèmes, Cap Gemini and other ESNs, Critéo, Doctolib, etc.

But first, the risk of this traditional capitalist approach is to reproduce many of the problems specific to GAFAM on our national territory, including monopolistic and duopolistic collusions against which the European Commission struggles so much. Do we want to recreate a French Meta that would own our social networks, our instant messaging, our favorite search AI, our smartphones, their payment system, and their digital maps?

Secondly, the risk of an impossible catch-up with GAFAM via these "black box" initiatives is also significant. Without sharing, without pooling, some components take a decade to be recoded.

A cooperative race

If Mistral, the new French AI champion, was able to keep up with OpenAI, it is thanks to open source, to free software. The same goes for the Chinese DeepSeek. If Mappy [the first French digital map] can offer a coverage as detailed as Google Maps without its billions of euros in investment, it is thanks to the collaborative and free project OpenStreetMap.

Even Apple and Microsoft, to catch up with the immense lead of Google Maps, have done so to some extent. Qwant did the same by launching its Maps.

Qwant Maps is dead, but easily replaced by us, Cartes.

The equivalent of OpenStreetMap for search engines remains to be built, and it would be a mistake to privatize it.

It is thanks to their open protocols and the transparency of their code that Mastodon and Bluesky have been able to compete with X and the Threads of the F in GAFAM. That the French Framasoft non-profit has been able to offer alternatives to Google services despite its tiny funding.

In an the article The National Library of Manufacturing (French) we outlined five years ago a radical solution to our loss of digital sovereignty. Which surely gave a shock to the believers in the dogma of the free hand of the market, and at the same time to the advocates of national retreat.

While Mastodon is a European project, Bluesky is American. Yet, it is entirely open source and interoperable, which greatly dilutes the matter of its nationality. All that remains is to build a Bluesky instance on European soil, now that its ingredients are served to us on a platter.

Go !

It is legitimate, no one wants the French State to store their vacation photos on its servers instead of Google. But it has an important role to play in shaking up the anthill of our digital dependence and organizing its open-source software backbone.

Because radicality is necessary, in the face of geopolitical adversity. Just as with Putin, every hesitation in the face of Trump and non-elected president Musk, every fear of provoking them will lead to a renewed confidence on their part that we are weak.

It is urgent that Europe acknowledges its position of being dominated and bets big on open source and European collaboration to meet the challenge of digital relocation.