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Comment by darkoob12 | Hacker News Reader

Fantastic. Now countries like Iran are going to be blocked. Internet is not a public network anymore It is owned by mostly American cooperation and they will decide what content to show and which group of people can access it.

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That's true. I recently had to move a VM from gcp to hetzner because gcp would silently drop all packets to some countries, Iran included. And a Stack overflow question was the easiest way to learn about it, not gcp docs.

I have looked at it recently and it seems Iran is blocking GCP, not the other way around. Not sure if Google keep a doc up to date with who blocks them.

Why do you think it's Iran doing blocking?

That's not what Google says: https://support.google.com/a/answer/2891389?hl=en

Workspace is not gcp.

From my past experience, I can say that Google Cloud services (e.g load balancers) by default blocked traffic from ITAR sanctioned countries. Not just blocking people in those countries from becoming customers of GCP, but blocking them from accessing content hosted on GCP.

I didn't know how that situation had evolved since I last used GCP.

Is it not ideal to block Iran?

Why should the 90 million people in Iran not have easy access to scientific knowledge?

Unfortunately their government is a historic adversary to many western nations. The people there are nice but that’s what happens.

So it is not _ideal_ , considering that human knowledge is a common good.

Disagree. It is ideal. Iran has been behind many terrorist activities over the decades.

So has the USA but we're mostly good people here.

I can't be angry at Google for following US law, any more than I can be angry at Huawei for following Chinese law.

The point is that this is not a punishment against "them", it's a loss for everyone (human kind), who affects for the vast majority innocent people both in Iran and all over the world. I don't see a world where this is "ideal", even if you agree with the block.

We don't know where the people who will make scientific breakthrough will be. Imagine losing the cure for cancer, or a form of clean energy (or anything that could change the world for everyone) due to this.

That’s nice and wishful thinking. This is just the sad truth regarding sanctions. If your country cannot participate on the global stage at least partially than the people suffer. No different than North Korea. It sucks but life is unfair and sucks.

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