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Comment by rotrux | Hacker News Reader

I am confused. Executive Order 13884 concerns only the government of Venezuela & about 150 specific people/companies in Venezuela. Am I misreading this order or did Adobe?

PDF: https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/Programs/...

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Probably, it is easier and safer for them to ban Venezuela completely, than to determine whether or not one of their customers is one of those 150.

But, they don't want to say that. They want to blame it all on the government.

A lot of companies do this. Claim that their own business decisions about how to implement government regulations were forced by the government, when in truth it is their own commercial decisions around cost of compliance and risk appetite which were determinative, not the government regulation alone.

I mean, what do you expect them to do? If it costs them more to serve a country than business from the country is worth due to regulations, do you expect them to keep serving the country at a loss? Is the regulation somehow not at fault? It's not like Adobe wants to stop taking people's money in exchange for the service.

They could just come out and say something like: "Although the sanctions only strictly speaking apply to the government and 150 individuals/entities, we have determined that the financial cost and legal risk of determining whether a customer is one of the sanctioned entities is commercially unfeasible, therefore we have decided that the only commercially feasible way for us to implement the sanctions is to block the country of Venezuela entirely."

i.e. Do the same thing they are doing now, just be more open and honest about their reasons.

> Although the sanctions only strictly speaking apply to the government and 150 individuals/entities,

They officially apply to anyone who has ever, directly or indirectly, done anything on behalf of the government, or of those identified individuals and entities. So, if they made your presentation, it would be an inaccurate minimization of the plain language of the executive order.

So do the same thing, but in a way that only people who understand business constraints will respond positively to? Sounds like a raw deal.

> Any person owned or controlled, directly or indirectly, by the foregoing

Seems like not much of a stretch to consider all citizens controlled by the Gov.

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