In the news

You probably won't get much more than a trickle of private individuals choosing for themselves to switch, but companies worried about their business secrets might move, and mandate their staff switch too. And governments worried about their strategic vulnerability might start requiring companies to adopt such policies.

Also i wonder if we'll see a sudden burst of investment in international internet links so that less traffic has to go via the US?

That's part of the wider picture, and the kind of thing that makes the paranoid part of my mind wonder if there're already more international arrangements in place. (Here, you spy on our companies and we'll spy on yours, then we can meet up at Bilderberg to pass on the good stuff to the business men who keep us in power...)

I missed another (fifth?) aspect of this story: whatever anyone's actually doing, it's clear that it's now technically possible and practically & politically plausible that someone is building Big Brother.

(And a sixth: do GCHQ help the NSA by spying on Americans? (Historically, yes.))

Laying trans-oceanic cable is so frighteningly expensive that you have, in general, to have government scale cash to invest in it I thought?