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Comment by smnrchrds | Hacker News Reader

Dear devs,

Please stop using Google Cloud Platform to host your projects.

GCP blocks Iran, so by hosting any part of the app on GCP, your apps become impossible to access from Iran. Azure and AWS do not do this. This form of blocking is exclusive to GCP.

After the switch to GCP, Iranians lost access to gitlab. Firefox Monitor is blocked in Iran for the same reason. The list goes on and on.

I don't believe Mozilla team for example has consciously decided to block Iran, just that their devs do not know about Google's policy regarding Iran. I hope all devs learn about this fact, so they make informed decisions when choosing cloud platforms.

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Every US companies must block Iran, it's not Google it's everyone.

https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/programs/...

https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/faqs/Sanctions/Page...

630. Is the provision or delivery of goods or services to an Iranian counterparty after November 4, 2018 allowed?

The wind-down period has ended and the United States intends to fully enforce the sanctions that have come back into effect. The provision or delivery of goods or services and/or the extension of additional loans or credits to an Iranian counterparty after November 4, 2018 — even pursuant to written contracts or written agreements entered into prior to May 8, 2018 — may result in the imposition of U.S. sanctions unless such activities are exempt from regulation, authorized by OFAC, or otherwise not sanctionable.

Canada too.

> Every US companies must block Iran,

This does not seem correct. Here is a short non-comprehensive list of services by US companies not blocked in Iran. The list is big enough, and the companies involved large and legally-savvy enough, that this cannot be an oversight.

* Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Outlook

* Google Maps, Waze (quite popular right now in Iran too!)

* Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive

* Github

* Google Keep

* Google Docs, Zoho

* ...

The complete list would be hundreds or thousands of pages long. Based on this, I don't think your assertion is correct. Either that, or every big US company is breaking sanctions on Iran with impunity. That does not seem plausible.

I don't know what are the details but I worked for a major company and they didn't even try to see if the service was against embargo they just blocked it. Gmail might not be blocked but can you create an email?

Yes, you can create an email.

The fact that your company "did not even bother to check" is a poor argument for "everyone has to do it".

They probably did checked but it was most likely complicated / subject to various limitations and with all those complications they decided to not provide services, like most US companies, that was pre 2018.

When a county is under embargo it's more complicated that just checking a website from the comfort of your chair, I remember many Iranians complaining about that but the chance that you're infringing some rules could lead to very very serious / expensive sanctions ( with DoJ / DoT ) it's just not worth it.

http://techland.time.com/2012/08/29/world-of-warcraft-blocke...

Zoho is Indian, not American.

Waze is Israeli. Which is actually more interesting.

Google bought Waze in 2013.

All their jobs are still in Tel Aviv, and the subsidiary is likely still registered in Israel.

Would that matter? I don't believe you can work around government sanctions by simply registering a subsidiary in another jurisdiction and saying "look, the company isn't officially in the US, even though it's owned by us".

No, but it indicates that it's also subject to Israeli restrictions.

Or... maybe developers should not play the games the Iran goverment want them to play and every effort should go towards throwing the current dictatorship not to stop using what they want us to stop using?

What about American developers? Shouldn't they stop using services like Google, Facebook, etc. Because of their proven collaboration with US intelligence service?

America is not a dictatorship, the chance of changing the goverment (and that includes its intel agencies) for the best by politics still exist so I don't even see the equivalence you are trying to make here, if anything developers and everyone else should _use those platforms_ (Google, Facebook, etc) to promote saner politics.

Most of the difficulties the author is mentioning are caused by the US sanctions that have been put in place after Trump's decision to walk away from the deal the US signed with Iran (against international laws). What you call "democracy" is causing most of the difficulties the author encounter, not the censorship or surveillance from the "dictatorship". But I think it's not more the role of developers to change the politics than any regular citizen. In that case, you might want to reconsider the products you buy from China as well.

Me stopping buying products from china would change exactly nothing, the only useful change against China tyranny that can be done is forbidding importations with new laws.

Why don't you overthrow the Iranian dictatorship?

Because I don't live in Iran, if there is ever a solution to the Iran tiranny it must happen from the inside and from its own people.

There's many Americans that didn't live in Iraq, but fully supported the toppling of Saddam.

Did you know it took about 25-30 years for South Korea to no longer look like a disastrous third world nation after the Korean War?

Millions of Korean people died in the process that made the South Korea of today possible. Was it worth it? Should the South Koreans regret their prosperity and freedom today? Should they have avoided the bloodshed and chosen to perpetually live under the Kim regime instead?

Saddam being gone is not a bad thing and the US should not have invaded the country to topple him. The US installed a functioning democracy with a constitution in Iraq, at enormous national cost to the US and to the Iraqi people. In 25 or 30 years, if the Iraqi people are even moderately free, living in a democracy and able to chart their own path as a people through elections, will it have been worth it? What would the alternative have looked like?

Not sure why it was presumed that I thought that toppling Saddam was a bad thing.

And play the game the US government wants them to play?

US is creating the situation were enough conservative Iranian (their are enough) are going to support their government just because sanctions and muslim ban exists.

Some down voters, but no counter arguments?

So you all basically think sanctions are going to work and the hardliners are going to cave in and agree to a new deal and not try to crush dissent?

Have you seen state of Venezuela? US threatened to go in and supported an opposition. And the result is failure and real tragedy for the people. Now they are blaiming Cuba.

You don’t need a majority to create a revolution that succeds. You need an enemy which is lacking morale and the means. The Iranian regime supporters now have morale (US dropping out of deal, and allies which can’t stop US influence) and they obviously have weapons to crush the resistance which have none.

Oh sorry, how many times did you overthrow your government? Any tips?

I did it once, Romania. Took about max 20k people in the street to start it.

My government doesn't need overthrowing yet, so no tips over here; there are some excellent books about it tho.

Is GCP blocking a result of the current sanctions on Iran? (ie. we can't differentiate what you provide so we'll cut everything) Or some other reason?

It's because of sanctions, but it's not recent. I think GCP had always blocked Iran, but I'm not sure.

In any case, Azure and AWS are complying with the same sanctions without a blanket ban. After all, they are American companies as well. Azure and AWS don't allow customers from Iran to purchase hosting services, but don't block access to all sites hosted on their platforms, and it seems that this is enough for US regulators to not consider them in violation of sanctions. I imagine Google has taken an extreme "better safe than sorry" approach which other players have fortunately decided not to copy.

I bet it's technical. Both GCP, YouTube and other Google properties suffered recently due to a misconfigured core switch in one of their regions. This implies they share at least network fabric between GCP and everything else. They probably slapped a blanket block over some shared infrastructure, and decided GCP is too much of a small-fry to justify the legal and technical work to be more nuanced.

(Disclosure: I work for MS but have no knowledge of our sanction compliance stuff)

This should be spread more widely. I didn't know this.

I'm interested in knowning more about this. Not a lot of information about it, I found this article from 2018... https://news.sky.com/story/google-faces-calls-to-lift-anti-c...

The documentation seems to be lacking, which explains why so many people in the US seem to have not heard of this. But as always, Stack Overflow has an outdated answer:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32678313/what-countries-...

Are you able to use VPN services from Iran to change the apparent country of origin of your traffic?

Not saying that's a great solution, but it's what I would try to do, provided VPNs aren't blocked by the government.

Dear dev,

Please disregard the message above. USA and Europe too are forbidding you to sell to Iran and a couple of countries. Google is doing you a favor by blocking traffic out of the box. If they didn't do it, you would most likely have to block it yourself.

There are official documents listing items and services you're not allowed to provide with how many years of jails you're risking. Just because you don't know about them and don't care won't be worth squat as a defense when the police will come knocking on your company's doors.

Google is not blocking access to Google Search, or Gmail, or Calendar, Drive, Photos, Maps, etc. Only access to dev tools (e.g. Android Tools) is blocked.

I am not a lawyer, but my understanding, based on the actions of companies with larger legal teams than most companies have employees, is that only a tiny portion of the apps need to be blocked in Iran to be compliant with the sanctions. Simplenote (hosted on GCP) is inaccessible in Iran while Google Keep is accessible, not because of sanctions but because Google's company policy blocks access to anything on GCP. I am sure the Simplenote dev would not be in jail had he chosen to host on Azure.

Quick rule of thumb, as soon as you're dealing with any payment or physical good, you're in quasi certain prohibited territory. That goes for EU countries too that could be considered somewhat chilled in comparison to the US.

Hence all businesses should be blocking Iran really, contrary to what you are implying... unless you have a magic business that sells nothing and earns no money. A note taking app might just fly, or not.

Based on the actions of large US tech companies, as described above and in my other comment [0], I believe the rule of thumb is "Don't take Iranian money."

If you are blocking access to a free-to-use service or the free tier of a paid service, you are using a stricter blocking scheme than seems to be required based on the actions of legally-savvy tech companies.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20494402

At this point, you clearly show that you have no understanding of export regulations or sanctions, and you're basically arguing that there can't be any because you've seen a well known company not block all access outright.

Get legal advise if you run a business. Don't do legal based on a hunch or an internet discussion.

It'd be pretty sad state of affairs if I had to hire a sanctions lawyer (they are a fair amount more expensive than regular ones) so I can sell, say, icon packs on the internet, but fortunately, that is not the case.

The reason Google's GCP block is outrageous is that they are on a mission to become one of the backbones of the internet, and as such, they are on a mission breaking the internet in US sanctioned countries. You defend this based on the largely misguided notion that US sanction law is so aggressive and unpredictable, that anyone one running a website would be better off with an auto-block of those countries, or risk his freedom.

In reality, the lack of such an auto-block from currently much larger providers (by multiples), and a lack of enforcement actions that could have been prevented by such a block, would tell us that this is FUD.

Outsourcing legal choices to google and others? In that case you better integrate real tightly with GCP so that nothing will work if GCP does not work. Or else...

Or else some Iranian, by accident, might find your endpoint that just happens to load. What then? You hope he does not rat out your company to the feds?

>Just because you don't know about them and don't care won't be worth squat as a defense when the police will come knocking on your company's doors.

Iran is sending oil to dictatorship which gasses children, changing our business strategy to appease the barbaric regime is not a priority for us.

Iran was sending this oil to us, the Syrian people, the "regime" was willing to start the winter oil supplies to the poor Syrian families on the next month, now the oil has been stolen by the GREAT DEMOCRATIC UK, and we will face the cold winter without oil, thanks to the new pirates of the Mediterranean.

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