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> 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 trou

> 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. That doesn't make sense to me, letting people from those countries access resources on GCP does make Google money, since presumably Google will be paid by the website owner (which doesn't live in any of these countries) for the extra bandwidth/resources used by their website.

dane-pgp 8y ago
Ironically you might have inadvertently provided the answer to your own question. If Google make money from a website owner (in the EU, for example), and that website owner makes money (using their website) from someone in a restricted country, then an imaginative prosecutor could argue that Google are guilty of knowingly facilitating some sort of "money laundering", from the restricted country to Google themselves. This is not much more far-fetched than the idea that a site like The Pirate Bay is guilty of "conspiring" with its users to infringe copyright.
- ubernostrum 8y ago
  This is not much more far-fetched than the idea that a site like The Pirate Bay is guilty of "conspiring" with its users to infringe copyright. "We're a piracy site, run by pirates, and we love piracy and pirates because of what piratical pirates we are, so we built a piracy site specially to cater to pirates and piracy! Also, we do not condone it in the slightest and built it for totally legitimate purposes, we promise!" Yeah, gonna go with "no" on that one. It does not take an "imaginative" prosecutor to find the incredibly unbelievably subtle and deeply-hidden links between the Pirate Bay and its intended purpose.
  - dane-pgp 8y ago
    I see what you're saying, and perhaps The Pirate Bay wasn't the best example I could have picked. Remember that the site IsoHunt was taken down as a result of a lawsuit, despite the name of the site literally suggesting it was a search engine for finding disk images of Linux distros. They also effectively complied with the DMCA, despite being based in Canada where the DMCA didn't apply: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IsoHunt#DMCA_takedown_notices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IsoHunt#DMCA_takedown_notices Of course the "intent" of the accused is something that a legal process can consider, but I've always been unimpressed with the argument of "It's right in the name!" when considering whether to censor The Pirate Bay. If they had changed their name to the "I Rate Bay", and branded themselves as a site for people to discuss and rate the quality of certain hex strings (magnet links), then, by the "It's right in the name!" argument, the site should be perfectly legal. There were a number of factors which lead to the legal judgements against The Pirate Bay (across the multiple jurisdictions where the site is censored), but if the legality of a site were to come down to a single letter in its domain name, and not based at all on the actual functionality of the site, then I think that would put us in a very odd place in terms of freedom of speech and the enforceability of the law. We're back to the "wine bricks" of the Prohibition era, with their "warning" not to leave the contents dissolved in a gallon of water in the cool cupboard for 21 days, to prevent "accidentally" creating wine: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/ingenious-brick-helped-wine-industry-survive-prohibition-180956412/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/ingenious-brick-he...

dane-pgp 8y ago

Ironically you might have inadvertently provided the answer to your own question. If Google make money from a website owner (in the EU, for example), and that website owner makes money (using their website) from someone in a restricted country, then an imaginative prosecutor could argue that Google are guilty of knowingly facilitating some sort of "money laundering", from the restricted country to Google themselves. This is not much more far-fetched than the idea that a site like The Pirate Bay is guilty of "conspiring" with its users to infringe copyright.

ubernostrum 8y ago
This is not much more far-fetched than the idea that a site like The Pirate Bay is guilty of "conspiring" with its users to infringe copyright. "We're a piracy site, run by pirates, and we love piracy and pirates because of what piratical pirates we are, so we built a piracy site specially to cater to pirates and piracy! Also, we do not condone it in the slightest and built it for totally legitimate purposes, we promise!" Yeah, gonna go with "no" on that one. It does not take an "imaginative" prosecutor to find the incredibly unbelievably subtle and deeply-hidden links between the Pirate Bay and its intended purpose.
- dane-pgp 8y ago
  I see what you're saying, and perhaps The Pirate Bay wasn't the best example I could have picked. Remember that the site IsoHunt was taken down as a result of a lawsuit, despite the name of the site literally suggesting it was a search engine for finding disk images of Linux distros. They also effectively complied with the DMCA, despite being based in Canada where the DMCA didn't apply: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IsoHunt#DMCA_takedown_notices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IsoHunt#DMCA_takedown_notices Of course the "intent" of the accused is something that a legal process can consider, but I've always been unimpressed with the argument of "It's right in the name!" when considering whether to censor The Pirate Bay. If they had changed their name to the "I Rate Bay", and branded themselves as a site for people to discuss and rate the quality of certain hex strings (magnet links), then, by the "It's right in the name!" argument, the site should be perfectly legal. There were a number of factors which lead to the legal judgements against The Pirate Bay (across the multiple jurisdictions where the site is censored), but if the legality of a site were to come down to a single letter in its domain name, and not based at all on the actual functionality of the site, then I think that would put us in a very odd place in terms of freedom of speech and the enforceability of the law. We're back to the "wine bricks" of the Prohibition era, with their "warning" not to leave the contents dissolved in a gallon of water in the cool cupboard for 21 days, to prevent "accidentally" creating wine: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/ingenious-brick-helped-wine-industry-survive-prohibition-180956412/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/ingenious-brick-he...