Yahoo and Microsoft join Iran sanctions

Last week it became known that Yahoo and Microsoft removed Iran from the list of countries whose citizens can open an account. Thus, Iranians are now formally unable to register an email box or use other personal services on the largest Internet sites. In addition to Yahoo and Microsoft, Skype has also begun to delete paid accounts where the country of Iran is listed. Although no one filters the IP addresses, so in practice the Iranians can register, but only by specifying another country in the profile.

What could be the logic in these prohibitions? Let's try to figure it out. Since the Iranians can not specify their country in the profile, they now can not receive targeted advertising and other personal services. But targeted information is potentially a very powerful tool for influencing information warfare. Perhaps some deep meaning is hidden in the actions of the American authorities? Although unlikely. Most likely, this is nothing more than fantasy, and joining web portals to economic sanctions is just a part of meaningless bureaucratic insanity.

Yahoo and Microsoft executives explain their surprising decision by the fact that the US government applies economic sanctions against Iran, under which US companies are strictly forbidden to work in the territory of a Persian country. Now someone has decided that Internet portals are also suitable for this official ban.

It all looks very strange. First, other states against which the United States applies economic sanctions are still present in the list of countries for registering users, for example, North Korea. Secondly, besides Yahoo and Microsoft, there are dozens of other free mail servers and various network services. For example, in the Gmail mail service, registration is open, and Google has already stated that it is not going to do such nonsense.