Android and iOS run on 99% of the world's mobile devices6. Two companies, two operating systems, and a single shelf on which every government, every civic institution, every digital identity project must place its product and hope the owners don't rearrange the display. That number should be the opening line of every digital sovereignty policy document. It rarely is.
I've watched governments discover this constraint for the better part of a decade, and the pattern runs on a loop. A ministry announces a sovereign digital identity initiative. Press conferences happen, the branding is impeccable, and then the engineers start building. Somewhere around month four, someone raises a hand and asks how the thing is supposed to run on phones that belong, at the operating-system level, to Apple and Google. The room goes quiet. The project continues anyway.
France's Bleu cloud is the version of this story that would be funny if the stakes were lower. Backed by Orange and Capgemini, blessed by the French state, Bleu exists to deliver one product: "Microsoft technologies in a French cloud"1. The name is French. The tricolore branding is French. The software underneath belongs to a company in Redmond, Washington, whose legal director told the French Senate that if American law compels disclosure, "we provide the data"2. He did not appear troubled by this.