I want to be very clear that I am not personally defending the concept of sanctions nor using them specifically against Iran. (I am also not denigrating it eith

I want to be very clear that I am not personally defending the concept of sanctions nor using them specifically against Iran. (I am also not denigrating it either: I am not well-versed in international politics or economics... I am heavily involved in politics, but at the local and regional level only.) Further, I am going to take "what the sanction is targeting" at face value here (lifted from the article), as that is not what I want to argue: I am just looking at the definition of "providing service". If it were the case that the sanction doesn't say Iranians in general, but targets something more narrow, that is irrelevant for my comment. > US law does not force companies to block IPs, but only prohibits them from providing services and trading with Iran, which goes back to politics, but my current argument is not commercial or political. It is my understanding that sanctions also apply even ignored you provide service to someone without compensation for said service, and it is also my understanding that providing access to a hosted copy of software is also a service (and one you are even providing to users at some cost; like, you are paying money for servers and bandwidth and disk i/o capacity to provide that service to users). If someone is thereby told that "Iranians are routinely using your hosting service to do X, Y, and Z" and, taking on face value that "Iranians" are sanctioned in a way that prevents providing them service, then you need to be able to do what you can to minimize that usage. I know... it sucks :(. (I say this with some force as I once was involved in an extended conversation with a lawyer about stuff like this where someone was asking about dropping a plane load of USB keys into a sanctioned area that eventually led to someone asking am exasperated question about what if we just let a bunch of balloons--with no payload!!--our over a sanctioned country, and the lawyers started being concerned that we were giving people free rubber ;P.) FWIW, someone else here mentioned GitHub got around it... by negotiating with OFAC to get a license, a solution that doesn't automatically apply to other services and which sounds like it might not even be available to other near-identical services that operate at a smaller scale or provide some slightly different set of services or don't have some other negotiating chip we don't know about. It is not clear to me that it is fair to argue that everyone needs to fight that particular fight.