Why is it that Microsoft are ok with serving traffic from countries under embargo but Google are not? As far as I know Amazon don't follow the embargo like this with AWS traffic either.
The truth is there could be a lot of reasons.
Another weird example: code.google.com was not available in 5 countries due to US state department controls. Github was.
Github was basically ignoring explicit guidance (this is not a statement of intentionality. I'm pretty sure when they started they didn't know and it became a pain to be compliant).
Google went and tried to get licenses (We eventually succeeded for most of them. At the same time, everyone ganged up together to try to convince state/etc to loosen up)
In the meantime, people complained that github was available but code.google.com was not, when the reason was "one was following the law" :)
https://futurism.com/google-jk-project-maven-work-military-s...
I am really interested in the real reason too.
This causes a lot of annoyances -- lots of features are not available in Chinese "AWS" regions, or they require special treatment. When I've gotten reports about slow, incomplete or stalled downloads from CloudFront it is almost always someone who's inside the Great Firewall.
I guess GCP decided not to bother with that approach for now.
If they were, AWS would not be present in any form.
Use GeoIP to serve your consumers in mainland from HK.