Firefox is open-source. That should satisfy the EU. They can always maintain their own copy of the git repo and built it themselves if they're worried about back-doors.

Individuals cannot use "personal responsibility" to combat a massive organization that hires psychologists who know exactly how to prey on human nature. It's not a fair fight.

We draw the line when the tool enables content that demonstrably causes massive harm to society and keeps enabling said harm because to do otherwise would hurt profits. Sec. 230 doesn't apply to Facebook because it does in fact moderate its content, so it's not a neutral communication provider.

You greatly under-estimate the antipathy for the USA that is building up outside the USA, and the willingness of Canadians and Europeans to avoid American products and services, even if it's a bit less convenient.

When your sovereignty and economy are threatened repeatedly, it clarifies the mind.

The mandate of a small nation's government is not sufficient to overcome the network effect of the incumbent platforms

I don't know how to begin to unpack this. The population of France is almost 67 million. So sure, it's not as big as the USA, but hardly a "small nation"

And this is likely being done in collaboration with other EU partners. The population of the EU is about 450 million... not so small now.

Second, Teams, Zoom, etc are video conference platforms. There are no network effects. If the French government wants to run a meeting, they just send a link to everyone, and as long as their platform can be used via a Web browser (which all decent videoconference platforms can) why would any participant care that it's not on Teams or Zoom?

They'll still have to use Teams/Meet/Zoom

Why will they still have to use any of those?

Within the government, they can use their platform. If they want to talk to a contractor or supplier or whatever, they just send a link to a meeting on their platform. As long as their platform can be used from a Web browser with no need to install special software, they can use it to communicate with anyone.

I recently took an online Dutch course. The teacher used Jitsi. I guarantee that other than my teacher and myself, nobody else in the class had ever heard of Jitsi before, let alone used it.

And there were no issues. The teacher gave us the link, we clicked it and the video conference started, and then we had our lesson.

Heel makkelijk en geen probleem.

Why do you need a client package? Any decent videoconference platform works find in a bog-standard Web browser.

Most videoconferencing platforms allow attendees to attend and host a meeting just with a browsers.

For example, Jitsi is free and you can use it just by visiting meet.jit.si. Up and running in a video meeting in 15 seconds with no software installation needed.

Meta's damage to society goes far beyond damaging kids' mental health. It also spreads disinformation, enables scam artists to defraud people, winks at exposing minors to sexually-explicit chatbots, and this is refelected in a whole list of media stories showing how shitty Meta is.

It's closed-source, though, and therefore IMO not trustworthy for a government to use.

Oh, thanks for the correction! You are right, and La Suite Numérique even has a GitHub organization. Very cool; I might look at their "meet" software.

F. B. Purity gives you a reverse-chronological feed and zaps most ads. Downside is it only works in a browser on the desktop, but then again that's the only sort-of-safe way to use Facebook.

I would consider using a fee-based social media platform if: (1) it never shows me ads; (2) it never shows me content except from people or groups I've explicitly chosen to follow; (3) it always presents posts to me in reverse-chronological order; and (4) it does not sell my personal information and does not use my personal information for algorithmic purposes or to drive "engagement".

I think I'd pay between $3 and $5 (CAD) per month for a decent platform like this if enough of my friends were on it too.

Of course, Meta will fuck it up and so I'll never consider it.

There's no mention of Visio being open-source, and indeed, it looks like just another proprietary platform. France is really missing an opportunity here.

OTOH, having dealt with the French government's procurement process in the past, it's a frickin' bureaucratic nightmare and I suspect the winners are the ones who most successfully wined and dined the politicians...