Now, your services that you host on Google Cloud are not available. Say you are Gitlab, and you host there (they do!). Now, if you put your Open Source project on Gitlab, that project is not accessible to Iranians either (as well as other sanctioned countries).

As someone you spends a couple of weeks every year in Iran, I can tell you that arbitrary websites breaking because of blocks on the US side have a far worse effect on my ability to work then the fact that Facebook and Twitter is blocked.

Why doesn't the documentation for date-fns work? Oh, they load the data from Firebase.

Why can't I compile by Android app? Oh, the Android repository is hosted on Google Cloud.

Etc.

This is US foreign policy. Bullish and stupid.

So this isn't really a problem with Apple or Google; it's a problem with the way US enforces sanctions on countries.

> Two years ago, under the guise of complying with American sanctions against Iran — sanctions that have existed for decades — Apple started removing Iranian apps from its platform.

Sanctions aren't always clear-cut, and if a buck is to be made, companies often try to stretch interpretations, try to fly under the radar or rely on the administration on being lenient in some aspects. So I'm not sure it's as simple as "sanctions existed before, so this must be the companies fault".

I'd much rather see sanctions in this space limited/removed - but I hold no hopes for enabling moves in this geopolitical game of power.

All these things are true. But this letter is written to the wrong people. This situation stems from a problem between our governments, and that is where it needs to be fixed. We have limited power to change this, but what power we do have is enacted by electing leaders who will work for a better solution. We get a chance to pick a US President again in just over a year.

Please, when the opportunities arise over the next 18 months, get out, get involved, and vote.

I've written about my own experience at https://alireza.gonevis.com/how-i-didnt-get-my-first-paying-...

Shouldn't trade sanctions be more fine grained? Having part of the population be part of the global economy seems like the best way to eventually push for change in those countries...

It's my opinion that the excluded, Iranians in the case of this article, should be having hard discussions about how they could get away from the likes of Google and Apple, not talks about how to integrate into an ecosystem that appears hostile.

I understand the difficulty of that in practice, but integrating into a group that makes hostile world-changing decisions about groups of people based on geography and cultural differences seems to just empower that group further the next time they try to inject political maneuvering into their business -- making them an even larger threat to those it disagrees with in the future.

In other words : Second verse, same as the first -- vote with your dollar, vote with your participation.

EDIT: "seldomly" should be "to a less extent"

Best to hope for in this environment is to expect nation states to waste more and more resources toward such unproductive endeavors and exploit the gaps.

Does anyone know enough about the legal angle to talk about what it would take to develop an alternative platform not impacted by US sanctions?

I recently got contacted about an old genetics project that stopped working because Java applets. I told them I can reimplement it in JS, just pay for my time. They said they would love to, but they are an Iranian institute, and I'm a US citizen. So it's a lose-lose situation.

The Iranian people are not the target -- Persia is a rich ancient civilization that's being repressed -- the West knows this and wants to see the Iranian people's massive creative potential unleashed.

Sanctions are designed as a non-kinetic force applied to pressure the Iranian government into a weakened position. The Iranian people play a significant role in amplifying the pressure. The louder and more vocal their voice becomes, the more pressure their government will feel. If the Iranian people want a change, the change has to come from within.

At some point, when the people amplify the pressure beyond the point the government can withstand, the situation tips and the people force their government to release. This is the effect the sanctions are designed to create.

The funds received by an Iranian civilian entrepreneur are still open to subjugation by the government. Without these funds, it will be more difficult for this government to destabilize neighboring states, blackmail the Sunnis across the gulf, and energize Hezbollah in their explicitly stated goals to genocide the Jews.