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I wish they hadn't done this. Google has a unique and strict interpretation of US sanctions on countries like Iran and Cuba, much more strict than that of Micro
by smnrchrds 8y ago
I wish they hadn't done this. Google has a unique and strict interpretation of US sanctions on countries like Iran and Cuba, much more strict than that of Microsoft or Amazon. If your site is hosted on GCP, Google blocks access to it from any sanctioned countries.
- miracle2k 8y agoExactly right. Much more attention needs to be brought to this subject. Imagining Google Cloud having as much market share as AWS is downright nightmarish. It would break large parts of the internet in those countries. I regularly travel to Iran, and can attest to a large number of random breakages (for example: the documentation of the date-fns library, because it loads data from Firebase). Google as an infrastructure provider simply has no business being involved in where my content is available. If they sell me a server that is not accessible from certain locations on the internet, I consider them to be selling a broken product.
- zzzcpan 8y agoGoogle is very pro-government, pro-censorship, pro-regulations, pro-military. It's better to just accept that it will never be a decent infrastructure provider because of that.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- glogla 8y agoI know Amazon or Microsoft aren't much better, but it's sad to see Gitlab use Google. I though Gitlab are the good guys.
- smallbigfish 8y agoLast year we couldn't access some aws server at work because it was on US gov blacklist. An aws server that hosted maybe hundreds of other unrelated websites. Amazon is just as bad. But I guess they have better PR.
- kayone 8y agoYou couldn't access _some_ AWS servers for a _period of time_, and you think it's equivalent to people in Iran, Cuba, etc. being completely blocked out of GCP? And the only difference is marketing?
- ZiiS 8y agoYour post makes it sounds like it is US Gov that is behaving like Google (i.e. running blacklists) not AWS?
- tootie 8y agoThey voluntarily withdrew from China to avoid censorship even though they are now backtracking that decision. Amazon was the one providing facial recognition to law enforcement. I don't see any of them as clear "good guys" or "bad guys".
- _wmd 8y agoThey withdrew from China due to the scorn of their security team having their asses handed to them by the people's liberation army ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aurora https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aurora ). 3 years later the exact same thing happened with the NSA ( Snowden leaks, NYTimes front page quotes of Google engineers swearing at internal network diagrams appearing in the leaks ), only ragequitting your home country doesn't quite work so easily Snark aside, the asymmetry in their dealings with foreign governments compared to their own is quite illuminating, and the above is by far not the only such incident
- JetSpiegel 8y agoMore context on the "backtracking" remark: https://theintercept.com/2018/08/08/google-censorship-china-blacklist/ https://theintercept.com/2018/08/08/google-censorship-china-... They bought a Chinese directory with a "search engine" that just redirects to Baidu, but kept all the juicy search terms to seed the future product.
- ma2rten 8y agoI work at Google. Google can be very conservative and risk-averse in following regulations, but ask far as I can tell Google is one of the least pro-government, pro-censorship, pro-regulations, pro-military corporations in the world.
- CryoLogic 8y agoThere are hundreds of instances of Google censoring websites, YouTube channels and plus accounts that promoted political philosophies that did not agree with the company culture. I think by that metric Google is very pro censorship when it comes to their own social media platforms
- mavhc 8y agoName 5
- trumped 8y agosometimes they do a "soft" censor and just push them down the search result list so that any casual user would never see them... but they also do some hard censoring.
- dane-pgp 8y agoIs your point that Google haven't censored more than 5 times, or that Google mostly censors people who aren't famous/memorable and therefore it's hard to name 5? https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/816mzt/big_alphabetical_list_of_banned_youtube_channels/ https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/816mzt/big_alph... Perhaps you're saying that, if provided with a list of 5 examples, you would defend why Google chose to censor in those specific cases. Unfortunately I don't know enough about the details of all these cases to be able to pick 5 particularly controversial examples, but I still feel uneasy about the amount of power Google has to silence opinions it disagrees with.
- agildehaus 8y agoLinking /r/conspiracy doesn't help your case.
- fierro 8y agoJust literally so wrong lol. Not even any citations or sources
- tanilama 8y agoBecause they are targets of everybody, liberals and conservatives alike, even their own employees. Everybody want to have a piece of Google in the fuzz they intended to create just to advance their own agenda. I won't blame Google for playing safe
- fierro 8y agoTalk about hyperbole. "Nightmarish" smh
- miracle2k 8y agoImagine the internet with all AWS data centers inaccessible to you.
- yzmtf2008 8y agoGoogle as an infrastructure provider simply has no business being involved in where my content is available. No, Google has no business in it, but export control does.
- manquer 8y agoMicrosoft and AWS don't seem to have any problems complying with the law
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- cobookman 8y agoWouldn't every US based company be under the same laws in regards to sanctions?
- zzzcpan 8y agoLaws don't dictate how companies behave.
- stingraycharles 8y agoActually they do most of the time, but when there is room for interpretation, different companies with different incentives choose to interpret them in different ways.
- smnrchrds 8y agoThe legal requirements are lower. They are not allowed to sell hosting to persons from sanctioned countries for example, and all companies follow that rule. But interpreting the law to mean you cannot show hosted sites to visitors from those countries (like Google) or that you cannot allow downloads of free software from your website (like Oracle JRE) is an over-reaction only some companies do. The real reason is that since they cannot extract money from these countries because of the sanctions, they don't care about their existence, or how much trouble people from those countries would face due to their decisions.
- miracle2k 8y agoI'm not sure if that is the reason. It is rather puzzling. A lot of Google Products work just fine, say Google Mail. On the other hand, the whole Google developers site is inaccessible (including everything from Android, to their Chrome/HTML5 information site etc). US law clearly requires no such action on their part. The don't earn money by letting packets from Iran route to their network; The people who could be losing money are their customers who's content is restricted.
- otterlicious 8y ago> cannot allow downloads of free software from your website (like Oracle JRE) The Oracle JRE contains strong cryptography which is illegal to export to certain sanctioned countries. It being free doesn't change anything about that. That one is actually legitimate.
- foobaw 8y agoI would hope GitLab did research on its own customers to be confident that the benefit significantly outweighed any negative impact.
- humanrebar 8y agoI think Alex Jones is a fool and spews all kinds of garbage into the public discourse, but I don't know why he would be banned but not countries officially recognized as problematic by Google's governing authorities (the U.S. government). That is "as long as it's legal" doesn't seem to be the governing principle for Google right now.
- anothergoogler 8y agoIf you dispute a law, your issue is with the government that passed and enforces it, not companies abiding by that law.
- smnrchrds 8y agoThis is not a legal requirement. Amazon and Microsoft do not do this, nor do Heroku, DigitalOcean,and countless other small and large companies. Google's interpretation of the law is unconventional and almost unique. (To the best of my knowledge, the only other company who interprets the law this way is Oracle, and that's saying something).
- kpil 8y agoIt's hard to tell until it's decided in a court. Until then it's everyone's best guess. Googles compliance officers might find it not worth the risk. There might also be other reasons one would prefer to follow the spirit of the law and help put pressure on two dictatorships where at least one of them seeds instability in many countries.
- miracle2k 8y agoThe IBM Softlayer Cloud does, or used to do it, as well.
- miracle2k 8y agoOther cloud providers don't do it. The idea that letting TCP packets be routed to the Google Cloud datacenter falls under "providing services" is clearly an incredibly expansive reading. I expect Google to make a little bit of an effort here.
- drivingmenuts 8y ago> If you dispute a law, your issue is with the government that passed and enforces it, not companies abiding by that law. It's another vector to apply pressure to get the issue resolved. There's the direct course (you to your congressperson) which likely won't matter, unless you have enough like-minded individuals all applying the same pressure. Then there's the indirect course (business to congressperson) which will likely matter more, since the business can donate larger sums of money, all at once. Politics is the opposite of business, as far as cash-flow is concerned. Business wants sustained, regular amounts to allow for forward planning. Politics wants bursted, large amounts of cash to immediately address issues of the day.
- krn 8y agoOVH is probably the only major non-US based public cloud provider[1]. It also happens to be the host of Wikileaks. [1] https://www.ovh.com/ca/en/public-cloud/instances/ https://www.ovh.com/ca/en/public-cloud/instances/
- anothergoogler 8y agoHetzner would like a word with you. Not only that, but there are tons of low-profile "cloud" hosting providers who only market to a single nation or a small region. Their websites are usually not in English. A couple years ago I did some digging on prominent South Korean websites, and they were all hosted by national providers.
- krn 8y ago"On January 11, 2016, Hetzner blocked the St. Petersburg site of Novaya Gazeta, the leading oppositional, non-governmental newspaper in Russia. The newspaper marked the act as political censorship without any legal procedure." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hetzner#Incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hetzner#Incidents
- anothergoogler 8y agoKudos on your Wikipedia research, but I don't think this has anything to do with my comment.
- krn 8y agoI pointed out OVH as a cloud provider with a strong stance on the internet without borders. Hetzner doesn't come even close in this regard.
- anothergoogler 8y agoPerhaps in your mind you did, but the comment I replied to was not so specific.
- solatic 8y agoDevil's advocate: IANAL but my understanding is that the kind of safe harbors that exist in other areas of IP law, e.g. that network providers are not responsible for copyright violations, either do not apply to export controls or have not been subject to sufficient legal review to establish a precedent that would protect Google from export control liability from software that is hosted by customers on their infrastructure where the customer has not undertaken the necessary measures to implement the export controls required by law. If you think the law is unjust, then target the law, don't target the companies which err on the side of legal caution. After all, certainly we'd prefer for companies to err on the side of regulators in many other cases...
- zzzcpan 8y agoThere are billions in fines of evidence that they don't care about the law and are willing to ignore it as long it benefits them. They are "legally cautious" purely strategically.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- r3vrse 8y agoWhile this sentiment is applicable (and agreeable) now, I can't help but think it is a little short-sighted. Can we really say <insert_megacorp_name_here> will do or not do 'X', or has some immutable policy 'Y', with any reliability? Historically, have we not seen that these policies change with the direction of the wind, and/or are applied inconsistently to suit narrative 'Z'? What is true today may not be true tomorrow. There is no bastion of moral decency in cloud infra, and to make decisions based on a current stance is facile and probably pointless. I'm far more interested in what awareness the GitLab folks have of this issue, and procedures in place to mitigate it, if any.
- eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y agoI agree this probably hurts if you're in those countries or doing business with entities in those countries, but what business would stop an architecture overall that they believe is the right move, only because of the small Iranian/Cuban market? Either way, the best way to fix this is to lobby Congress.
- miracle2k 8y agoYou're right that for most, there isn't a business case to care about access to these sanctioned countries (there are more than just those two that Google is blocking). I wouldn't say you won't be locking out any users: people in Iran obviously do use, say, source control. But sure, the monetary loss is very limited. But ideology can be a powerful reason. And people in Open Source can be very ideological. Certainly for me, this makes Gitlab a no-go. I want my code to be accessible by everyone. I do wonder what kind of pressure could be applied to Gitlab in terms of free software developers shunning the platform.
- btasovac 8y agoWe are sorry that there are legal restrictions that are imposed for these countries. There isn't much we can do about this, but we have an open issue discussing this [1]. You can also see the U.S. Department of the Treasury link [2] for more details regarding these sanctions. We planned this move because we wanted to improve our stability, and you can read all the technical details that affected our decision in our blog post [3]. [1] - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/migration/issues/649 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/migration/issues/649 [2] - https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/Programs/Pages/Programs.aspx https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/Programs/... [3] - https://about.gitlab.com/2018/06/25/moving-to-gcp https://about.gitlab.com/2018/06/25/moving-to-gcp