Interesting to see this in B2B, which is normally unemotional about choice of supplier. But the business risk is now real, especially when you consider GDPR safe harbour.
I've seen this once before a few years ago with Huawei stuff.
Shouting to the Board of Directors at any company about security risks and geopol implications usually meant screaming into a void.
"But their HQ is here." "We have a solid security annex in the contract!" "Their sales person was here and he promised me." Classic lawyer C-suite talk.
But when the attitude started shifting billions were thrown around to move back to Ericsson.
C-suite people will constantly get these questions and start to feel like they 'have to' go European just like how they all thought we 'had to use Agile' and 'had to do something with blockchain'.
Few forces in economics are stronger than C-suite FOMO.
Herd behavior in CEOs is a very strong problem. It's one thing to make a mistake, but if you make a different unorthodox choice and something goes wrong then it looks especially bad.
The fear is trade war (rising prices to extortion levels), blockades of network traffic (holding data hostage) and war (which leads to sabotage, manipulation and destruction of data).
It seems to me that this is still unemotional (where really I'd rather say mercenary, as I've seen so many business decisions driven by ego, which is definitely emotion).
Businesspeople have seen the U.S.A. do things like the Citibank account freezes, which is explicitly welching on paying money owed on a contract to companies in its own country, turning off and on supplies to a country at the personal whim of its leader, putting air traffic safety at risk as a means of privatization (using the OCP playbook straight out of RoboCop), and arresting foreigners at its borders.
If they've been paying close attention they've seen civil suit court orders ignored, lawyers having executive writs of attainder proclaimed against them, and rulings handed down about blanket and extensive executive privilege and immunity that take things back to the centuries past when banks could go out of business by lending to monarchs who then just decreed that they weren't going to pay.
Even the dumbest CEO would by now be thinking of the business risks of things like flying in personnel to a business conference or to visit a satellite office; let alone of supply chain reliability, whether U.S.A. courts are still capable of enforcing any civil decisions or U.S.A. lawyers capable of doing their jobs on behalf of foreign businesses, and what this means for loan risks and banking stability.
