Re: What's all this then?
Investors will tell you to sod off if you deliberately exclude USA and all American companies out of your customer base day one
Ah, but herein lies the irony: IMPORTING high grade crypto kit isn't illegal (although paranoia suggests the US would quickly slap an import tariff on it if you were to start affecting the revenue of the government's paymasters). So you could still sell to US businesses, and I have a feeling that it's not the US businesses who want backdoors (well, OK, except the IT outfits who probably make a mint selling access to the agencies).
There's also the little issue that "US" crypto isn't actually of "US" origin at all. AES was originally called Rijndael, but that obviously sounded too foreign, and was developed in the country that once gave us techno, Belgium. This suggests that it's not actually going to be spectacularly difficult to obtain another cipher without the US having a foot in the door, but validating it is where the costs lie (as a matter of fact, a number of governments, amongst which the UK, do maintain other ciphers as well).
IMHO, given the continued behavioural problems of the US government it becomes more and more commercially feasible to develop a non-US cipher - as a matter of fact, I personally think we've reached the point where you could probably get an EU grant for it, the trick is to keep the whole thing as open as possible because that makes subverting it hard (sunshine works)..
Biting the hand that feeds IT
