@neil This feels like similar themes to the Ken Thompson “Trusting Trust” lecture, but on the network and services side.

Its a big internet, and as an individual (or even a large corporation) you only have a very limited reach. Ultimately you have to trust someone, so it really comes down to who do you trust, and who do they trust?

Your self-hosted e-mail system doesn’t do you much good if your ISP goes away, and who are they trusting? Huawei? Cisco? What about the next hop? And the question is essntially fractal; The problem looks very similar at every scale from individual to company to country to all of europe.