Yes, although there are degrees and differences in culture.

For instance in the telco world you have a much more direct dependence on regulators because you need a stack of expensive and hard to acquire licenses to operate a network in most parts of the world. Some worse than others. In that environment there is a very high degree of compliance with regulators because they have to be given explicit permission to operate.

For pure internet services or P2P applications it is quite a bit different. You don't actually need anyone's permission to distribute software. And you can move your servers around the world. You don't depend on permission - just that nobody comes after you with warrants you cannot ignore.

So the advice is really to look at who you are dealing with and how dependent they are on regulators to operate.

Large internet companies tend to have entire divisions whose job it is to tell regulators to get lost or at the very least maintain a really high bar for interference. Of course, this becomes difficult when the government is also a large customer. So for instance you might want to be careful with vendors who make a lot of money in / off of the defense and intelligence sectors.

Thank you for the explanation! Seems to me that you're describing a trust chain where the product is directly affected by the landscape in which the parent company operates and their biggest customer base.

I really appreciate your insight.

Use Jitsi (https://jitsi.org). You can find people to host or host your own. Open Source. No downloads for participants. try their instance meet.jit.si

I'd love to, but IME it's unstable with more than a handful of participants and doesn't offer stuff I need, such as breakout rooms.

Unfortunately, Jitsi isn't a viable solution at this point except for 1 on 1.