Yahoo! Kicks Iran from Its Lists

The move by Yahoo and Microsoft comes after the U.S. administration has increased economic pressure on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's government, which began about two weeks ago.

A Yahoo spokeswoman told the Register, a British web site covering the online world that "Yahoo! continually reviews its business operations to ensure compliance with these restrictions. Consistent with this policy, we cannot accept registrations from countries subject to these restrictions. […] Essentially, you can't choose Iran as a country option because we are restricted from conducting business there - all US companies must comply with this policy." The other giant to take Iran off its list, Microsoft, had no comment on the matter.

Google, however, did not join in this endeavor to "punish" Iran and said that the sanctions do not prohibit it from keeping Iran on its Gmail country list: "Google is committed to full compliance with US export controls and sanctions programs and is confident in our compliance with those controls and programs."

The Mountain View based company is perhaps trying to make up for the mistake it had previously done in another censoring country, India, where it provided the authorities with data that helped them find, catch and convict a user of it's social network Orkut.com that had posted modified vulgar pictures of a local history figure. The OpenNet Initiative, actually a partnership of Harvard, Toronto, Oxford and Cambridge universities, says that Iran has recently installed "one of the most extensive technical filtering systems in the world."

Come to think of it, Yahoo! itself has had very much the same problem that Google was faced with in India when it provided the Chinese authorities with the exact location and email content of a political dissident that was believed to have traded state secrets with foreign governments.