It's the interpretation of some cloud providers that exchanging datagrams with entities in OFAC-sanctioned countries constitutes a prohibited transaction.
There's a big list of allowed Internet activity between the US and Iran.[2] It is explicitly US policy to not cut off Iran from the Internet. The State Department wants people in Iran to get info from the outside world. However, the US does not allow US domain registrations or web hosting "for or on behalf of the Government of Iran".
The Office of Foreign Assets Control can be queried for case by case info. That's appropriate here.
[1] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-31/subtitle-B/chapter-V/p...
[2] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-31/subtitle-B/chapter-V/p...
They should interpret the law to mean "We will treat every request from Iran as a non-paying customer, and won't offer anything outside the free-tier"
Even if that isn't the way was written, it is plain that it falls within the intent of the law, and is beneficial to US businesses.
No judge will send a google employee to prison because someone located in Iran managed to download a copy of the docker image to Alpine Linux from the google/amazon container registry...
Even if vindicated, the process can be costly.
I would argue that for unpaid services (for example serving up web content), we should not be applying sanctions. Those specific sanctions are so easy for the iranians to work around (VPN), and so damaging to our businesses (no worldwide service).
You know what is much more unattractive to these businesses? Getting on the wrong side of the US government. And honestly, I don't see any business (except for ones in Russia, China and Iran) changing provider because they don't provide service to Iran.
> damaging to our businesses (no worldwide service)
I'm confused, are you arguing here for allowing free-tier services under the sanction regime, or for getting rid of sanctions against Iran altogether? If it's the latter, then the argument is self-consistent. But if it's the former, then you're effectively saying that an american business which currently doesn't provide any services to iranian customers would instead prefer to provide free-tier services for them without any way to get them to paid tier, and that doesn't make any sense. If you know that users from a certain region would always be at 0% conversion, you would get nothing by providing them with a free tier.
They consider Google cloud, but then reject it because GCP cannot serve users in Iran, and Wikipedia's policy is to be globally available.
Google loses worldwide revenue from all of wikipedia.
(I have met multiple companies who have dismissed GCP for this reason. Even companies with no current business in Iran might one day want to expand there, so don't want to make infrastructure choices which lock them out).
I encourage you to skim through the sanctions. I promise you that you will find plenty of exemptions telling you not to block every Iranian citizen from communicating, not to block them access to information, not to block them from free-to-use services, not to prevent them from traveling etc etc.
If you just cut the whole country off the internet, how do you expect them to organise towards overthrowing the government? Via carrier pigeons?
You de-risk your enterprise significantly by cutting Iran out completely, and you only lose the handful of dollars this would’ve translated into down the road.
Some customers aren’t worth having.