Asked by an Iranian member of the audience if Google will stop blocking Android or Chrome downloads in his country, Schmidt said that the ban was due to US sanctions on Iran and that "we can't violate US law."
Is this due to crypto within the software or what?
EXPORTS TO IRAN - In general, unless licensed by OFAC, goods, technology, or services may not be exported, reexported, sold or supplied, directly or indirectly, from the United States or by a U.S. person, wherever located, to Iran or the Government of Iran.
That has to be the reason, because any software(libraries or executables) that contains SSL encryption code is covered as a weapon under export rules.
That stopped being the case years ago.
It is for the most part an unfortunate fact that regulators are a stifler of innovation. What has their recent push for SOPA just taught us? If they want to regulate it to truly protect people that is one thing. For example, children need to be protected from predators who would exploit them on the Internet. However,when regulators attempt to regulate out of greed (because their pockets are being laced by Hollywood or some other interest group) they ruin things for everybody.
I can live pretty well without innovations in privacy intrusion systems. ;-) But I'm looking forward to their innovations in deleting or hiding interconnected data. That's still a huge problem, I'm wondering what they 'innovated' to delete my G+ account while not becoming totally inconsistent on related pages of people following me etc. (I intentionally deleted it yesterday)
I can assure you Google and any sane Internet company never truly deletes anything, such that it is unrecoverable. They just mark it as deleted so that, it doesn't get served up but nothing is invalidated.