Philippe Latombe, a member of the French National Assembly, advised Pap Ndiaye, the minister of national education that free software offered by Microsoft and Google was a form of data dumping and was worried about the data sovereignty issues involved with storing personal data in an American cloud service.

Last week, the Ministry of National Education published a written reply to confirm that French public procurement contracts require "consideration" -- payment.

"Free service offers are therefore, in principle, excluded from the scope of public procurement," the Ministry statement says, and minister Ndiaye has reportedly confirmed this position. This applies to other free offerings like Google Workspace for Education.

Paid versions of these cloud services might be an option if they hadn't already been disallowed based on worries about data safety.