US sanctions compliance most likely
Edit: confirmed by Gitlab: https://twitter.com/gitlab/status/1312183287402512384
Having had the opportunity to meet the former in their homeland so so long ago, many Americans do not understand how grueling the sanctions regime system is for average Iranian citizens in their everyday; this is sadly a minor example as I saw based experiences a decade ago. It does not impact government officials as much as we hope, and the citizens are far, far less empowered to force government change to break free of a system sanctions hopes to disincentivize (I will not even waste time here, Google and look, even recent attempts lead to backlash).
As a Westerner, and a lover of HN, I would love to see data-driven examples of sanctions actually working. Was South Africa are only positive example from US sanction strategies? I will go look, but this is one of many examples in Iran of us causing resentment and confusion for citizenry and not really helping. (For Americans, this is a not a red-blue problem if we talk long-term approach, all political parties have sided with sanction strategies in the long-term for a while: Cubans and Iranians we have punished and it has not really seemed to help us _in the long-term_ shifting their governments and policy objectives, but I would love to see evidenced counterpoints.)
The first time I was struck by this perverting are efforts in explaining open society to citizens of countries with indifferent governments was a decade ago, when SourceForge did the same thing. We respect the rule of law, but to spite the faces of democratic cultural principles. Oh well.
EDIT: I see this question has been asked in other threads, but not answered. Whether Iran should be punished is a separate question (one on which I am personally too ignorant to hold an opinion about) from how should one country punish another.
It is not for the US to "punish" other world states, even if "Iran should be punished".
If you, or your state, believe some kind of sanctions are in order, there are international bodies and forums where this can be discussed and decided upon: The UN security council, international courts, and other more specialized bodies, some of which can make decisions which constitute sanctions.
This whole article is about a US company enforcing US rules.
Not really. GitLab is an international entity regardless of where it is registered, because it presumes to be a platform for (some forms of) interaction and information sharing for people in many countries. It is implicitly agreed between users and the entity behind the website that it is accessible and usable by everyone.
> Why should one country not allowed etc.
It is not about "allowing", in the sense that I'm not in control of the US and what it does, we are discussing what is morally acceptable. And it is not morally acceptable for individual states to disrupt people's lives using the aspects of inter-dependency of people, groups and organizations across state boundaries - except according to norms which are accepted and defensible at the global level.
Sanctions should never be part of a punitive system, which at the level of a whole country is inevitably unjust. They should only be part of an incentive system, where you hope to steer the other country to the direction you want. Looked at it this way, we wouldn't ask ourselves whether sanctions are warranted. We'd ask ourselves how effective they are.
Oh, and there's this question of whether a country should have the right to influence another country to begin with. Not gonna answer that one here.
Are sanctions influencing another country, or limiting how companies and people from the sanctioning country interact with foreign entities?
> They should only be part of an incentive system
Has an incentive system between countries ever been implemented and worked? For a specific what-if, is there a way that we could have realistically "incentivized" Cuba to disassociate with the USSR?
I don't think imposing sanctions has worked to our advantage ever, in any country, in the past 50 years we have used them. And in many, they have backfired, e.g. Iraq in the 90s. That isn't even to mention the hundreds of thousands of innocent people who lose their life. [1]
Yet, sanctions are considered to be "soft" and "dovish" by politicos and the general public. It's stupefying.
https://www.nytimes.com/1995/12/01/world/iraq-sanctions-kill...
I'm strongly opposed to these sanctions, and I also think GitLab should've given people notice so they could get their data out. But I'm not sure it's a good place to pull the racism card.
Also worth noting that GitLab has previously banned hiring from China/Russia, so it's no stranger to blanket bans of questionable nature.
1 - https://www.zdnet.com/article/gitlab-considers-ban-on-new-hi...
Economic sanctions against America would not be racism against scots/germans/west africans or whatever.
You can argue against sanctions on all sorts of grounds, but the flimsiest is claiming that they're racist.
I think that singing about how you want to destroy the country, how you want to choke it etc. do prove racist tendencies.
As for armed forces acting outside of borders, you cannot claim that U.S. armed forces are any more 'authorized' to be in these places than Iranian ones, can you?
So in the end, it comes down to nothing more than the U.S. having the ability to implement these sanctions and Iran not, there's no 'principles' in it, just geo-politics.
What is remarkable however is that this pandemic is a uniquely challenging situation even for countries not under sanctions, so placing new sanctions on the country, as was recently done, is plain inhumane.
Oh come on. That is not scraping the barrel but the bare metal underneath for offense. And most people die of hearth attacks anyway.
I wouldn't consider not hiring from countries with aggressive foreign policies and non-democratic governments that use coercion on their own citizens (including employees of said company) as questionable. GitLab's main job is to protect it's company and it's customers not to try to build some sort of utopian post-reality civilization.
If we go by that logic, the U.S. would get on that list.
> non-democratic governments that use coercion on their own citizens
If that was indeed the standard to go by, I'd agree, but the list would then need to be much, much longer and possibly include even some traditionally democratic countries like Australia who have an actual law where they can force employees to secretly install backdoors.
Saudi Arabia infiltrated Twitter and compromised some of its employees to obtain info on regime critics that could endanger their lives, as just another example.
The list would by these metrics include well over half the world.
I put an AND in my statement for a reason, please don't cherry pick parts of sentences.
>The list would by these metrics include well over half the world.
That's like saying that if you don't want to die you should live in a cocoon and never leave the house, rather than just making sure to avoid the most dangerous activities. GitLab is blocking the countries it sees as the most risky and carry the least cost in blocking. I'm sure their lawyers would love to block half the world but that would cost them too much.
As a non US-citizen, I don't really care if the US is democratic or not.
People have voted and continue to vote for terrible things. What matters is what a country does. So actually the US would certainly be on that list.
Unless your argument is, it's not evil if we all voted for it?
This has nothing to do with good and evil which seems to be a point you're missing. It's about risk of coercion to employees of companies. The US government could be turning babies into hand bags but if it doesn't coerce it's residents into acting against their employers then it doesn't create a risk for companies.
edit: Seriously, this was all in the original sentence that you people keep cherry picking from.
> 118. I have a client that is in Iran to visit a relative. Do I need to restrict the account?
> No. As long as you are satisfied that the client is not ordinarily resident in Iran, then the account does not need to be restricted.
https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-sanctions/...
Depending on the actual sanctions these might not require a blanket ban on paper but in practice there is no effective way of performing sufficient KYC for every individual from Iran to comply with the sanctions even if they only target specific individuals and institutions.