The whackos in the White House apparently don’t want Iranians to sign up for Yahoo Mail or Hotmail, or at least the two services think that’s what is on Bush Administration’s mind. Crazy. Just when the U.S. could benefit from a more open Iranian society with less fanaticism. Gmail, interestingly, still allows registration. Smart. In fact, maybe D.C. should be paying Net companies to encourage e-mail accounts from Iran, and perhaps Cuba for good measure.
By the way, the TeleBlog gets visitors from Iran. Does this mean we should block Iranian IP numbers, lest people there buy an E-book Research Report from our advertiser? Oh, and what about e-book sites? Should they shut out Iranian customers? Will the feds be policing them?
From the general region—Dubai: Book fair to attract electronic publishers, in Gulfnews.com, which also reports that "More than 100,000 Arabic and English book titles are available at the website, www.swbf.gov.ae… The number of foreign publishers increased from 135 to 200 from 2005 to 2006."
And speaking of Gmail: CNET reports on improvements in Gmail. "One thing you might notice is that mail browsing is faster. Google pre-fetches messages in the current view, so when you open an e-mail your browser doesn’t have to communicate with the server; it just displays the message instead."
this is really crazy news, but it is the logical conclusion of the export controls. email is a way to circumvent state media, so I think you can make exceptions. On the other hand, the US has a lot of digitial services it sells.
I suspect the ban was targeted toward tangible goods, but really there are not too many differences between exporting a PC and selling the ability to share photos online.
Of course, Iran can retaliate simply by an oil embargo or deciding to denominate all its oil sales in Euros instead of dollars. That would be a nightmare scenario.