With Apple’s vigilante-sanctions-enforcement/racial profiling of Iranian Americans receiving well-deserved attention, we wanted to spotlight similar over-enforcement of broad sanctions by tech companies impacting people inside Iran. Below is a list of services not technically blocked by sanctions but still denied to Iranians by U.S. companies, compiled via researcher Collin Anderson who maintains and updates the list here:
Publisher Product Blocked By Company Require License? Notes Google Talk X N AdSense X Y AdWords X Y Android Market X N Google Code X N App Engine X N Cannot Host or Access Resource on Platform Yahoo Yahoo Messenger X N Yahoo Yahoo Web Messenger No SSL Support N GoDaddy (all) X N Webpage Does Not Respond Adobe (commercial products) X Varies Webpage Does Not Respond Geeknet, Inc. Sourceforge X ITAR Issue McAfee MacAfee Antivirus X Y Symantec/Norton (all) ? Y AVG Technologies (all) X Y Oracle MySQL X Not Where Free Oracle NetBeans X N Xacti Group inbox.com X N cPanel, Inc. cPanel X Y Logitech (all) X Varies
Even as the Iranian government engages in cyber repression, U.S. sanctions help those efforts by making it illegal to make available any hardware and most software and services to Iran. In the aftermath of Iran’s post-election protests in 2009 that mobilized around social networking tools, President Obama took steps to exempt certain Internet communication tools from the sanctions. He renewed the effort this past Norooz, but so far U.S. companies have done little in response.
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