“ “They are either incompetent at OFAC interpretation or racist,” said Oxford researcher Mahsa Alimardani, who specializes in communication tools in Iran.” <- calling Slack racist for doing this is a bullshit accusation, made only because the western college-educated class is incentivized by the priority of what their institutions punish to portray all kinds of misbehavior as a type of racism.
I’m certainly no fan of Slack, but I believe them when they say ““We only utilize IP addresses to take these actions. We do not possess information about nationality or the ethnicity of our users.”, and that these bans were probably an unintended consequence of a geolocation change that no one at slack predicted might have had this effect. “the mechanics of sanctions enforcement make it simpler for companies to ban first and ask questions later. The cost of violating US sanctions can be enormous, while the cost of deactivating a defensible account is relatively small. In many cases, companies prefer to avoid the details of sanctions licensing for fear of making an expensive mistake.” is frankly pretty reasonable, and I don’t blame Slack as a company for making decisions based on that perverse incentive.
The real problem here is that so many institutions are using the services of a single US-based private company to run their chat infrastructure in the first place, which makes them vulnerable to all sorts of private decisions that might affect their ability to chat. It doesn’t matter if slack kicks you off because you happened to be in Iran and slack is bound by US law to try to figure out whether anyone in Iran is using their service and prevent them from doing so, or because some other government made some law that slack feels bound to respect that restricts your ability to speak on their service, or because their servers all blew up one Tuesday, or any of a hundred other reasons - at the end of the day, if you rely on Slack you can communicate on it only at their pleasure. Which should be a powerful incentive against using Slack to begin with.
Interesting collision between politics and tech. I keep coming back to this, and thinking the only way to make this work, long term, is to disassociate tech companies with responsibility for what they cause. Tech is about tools, responsibility is for the users.
“ “They are either incompetent at OFAC interpretation or racist,” said Oxford researcher Mahsa Alimardani, who specializes in communication tools in Iran.” <- calling Slack racist for doing this is a bullshit accusation, made only because the western college-educated class is incentivized by the priority of what their institutions punish to portray all kinds of misbehavior as a type of racism.
I’m certainly no fan of Slack, but I believe them when they say ““We only utilize IP addresses to take these actions. We do not possess information about nationality or the ethnicity of our users.”, and that these bans were probably an unintended consequence of a geolocation change that no one at slack predicted might have had this effect. “the mechanics of sanctions enforcement make it simpler for companies to ban first and ask questions later. The cost of violating US sanctions can be enormous, while the cost of deactivating a defensible account is relatively small. In many cases, companies prefer to avoid the details of sanctions licensing for fear of making an expensive mistake.” is frankly pretty reasonable, and I don’t blame Slack as a company for making decisions based on that perverse incentive.
The real problem here is that so many institutions are using the services of a single US-based private company to run their chat infrastructure in the first place, which makes them vulnerable to all sorts of private decisions that might affect their ability to chat. It doesn’t matter if slack kicks you off because you happened to be in Iran and slack is bound by US law to try to figure out whether anyone in Iran is using their service and prevent them from doing so, or because some other government made some law that slack feels bound to respect that restricts your ability to speak on their service, or because their servers all blew up one Tuesday, or any of a hundred other reasons - at the end of the day, if you rely on Slack you can communicate on it only at their pleasure. Which should be a powerful incentive against using Slack to begin with.
Interesting collision between politics and tech. I keep coming back to this, and thinking the only way to make this work, long term, is to disassociate tech companies with responsibility for what they cause. Tech is about tools, responsibility is for the users.