Good. More people should have a taste of these absurd IP range blocking practices (and hopefully they get to experience more of IP range inconveniencing practices like endless CAPTCHAs as well). People who have never experienced these tend to have a very naive view of the freedom of the Internet in 2024.
I was just having a chat with some friends yesterday about sanctions in general, and how wildly ineffective they are most of the time. I believe they often have a negative effect: they hurt regular citizens while the leaders who they're meant to target suffer little, and instead of achieving their intended goals, they turn citizens in the target country -- even those who are not happy with their government -- against the countries imposing the sanctions.
I do expect that sanctions make inroads toward their stated goals. Sure, less money means less weapons, probably, and the choice of suppliers becomes more limited, meaning costs are higher, and quality might suffer.
But Iranian sanctions have been in place for decades, with little to no changes in their government that the West would consider favorable. Cuban sanctions didn't do much "good". Russian sanctions haven't ended their war in Ukraine.
Sure, sanctions can serve to contain adversaries to some degree, and slow things down, but they don't seem to really do much positive. And their negative effect on goodwill and relations really sours longer-term diplomatic efforts. I do tend to feel like they have a net negative effect, most of the time.
Whats the alternative though? Just completely open the trade barriers as if those countries are not invading neighbouring, strategically important countries or committing human rights violations or engaging in war crimes or etc. etc.?
I mean, the US weapons companies could probably profit (massively?) from the removal of sanctions, but then the US essentially becomes complicit in those activities.
Sanctions allow for passive involvement; making the message clear without breaking sovereign borders.
> how wildly ineffective they are most of the time
I'm not sure it's possible to judge the effectiveness since we can't see both scenarios at once in order to compare. I have the gut feel that, considering what I wrote above, there's a fair level of visceral effectiveness in the reduction of growth of quality of life in those places. There's also the effectiveness of the population of "country applying the sanctions" knowing their government are on the "right" side of a right vs wrong fight - that's a kind of soft benefit, but there's a slight warm-fuzzy that the patriots get that's internally politically useful, and therefore effective in a certain way.
Making something difficult to acquire certainly doesn't stop the things from being acquired, but it staunches the flow, and that most definitely has an effect (and, separately, can flush out those facilitating sanctions evasion).
As an aside, and maybe on your side of the argument, is the sanctions on Russian oil/gas, and how we're still not entirely sure who blew up that pipeline because there seem to be valid arguments for it being done by either side (the US or Russia).
Lastly and more to your point than mine, sanctions on (Nvidia/)China for the export of GPU's over a certain 'power' seem laughably based on fear-of-fading-into-economic-obscurity; the late realisation of having lost a fight they organised and then didn't show up for.
The alternative is to do the opposite:
Flood their market with cheap subsidized products that wreck their economy and drives them into economic dependency.
We cannot have a conflict with china because we are too dependent on them.
Ineffective? Try engaging in sanctioned trade or trade with sanctioned people or entities and see how fast you end up on the list of sanctioned people or entities. Getting your name removed may take decades.
I had a similar issue with Hetzner. I host my downloads on a Hetzner cloud machine, and one of my customers reported that they couldn't download updates. Turns out their company used some enterprise security product named "Zscaler" that mis-identified the IP of my Hetzner VM as Iranian and blocked it.
My customer contacted Zscaler, and after a few days they unblocked it.
Do sanctions really require blocking all access from Iranian IPs to sites hosted by a US provider? Don't they usually just require not doing business with people from sanctioned countries?
Good. More people should have a taste of these absurd IP range blocking practices (and hopefully they get to experience more of IP range inconveniencing practices like endless CAPTCHAs as well). People who have never experienced these tend to have a very naive view of the freedom of the Internet in 2024.
I agree they are dumb. Unfortunately, many companies are legally obligated to do it. To comply with sanctions.
I was just having a chat with some friends yesterday about sanctions in general, and how wildly ineffective they are most of the time. I believe they often have a negative effect: they hurt regular citizens while the leaders who they're meant to target suffer little, and instead of achieving their intended goals, they turn citizens in the target country -- even those who are not happy with their government -- against the countries imposing the sanctions.
I do expect that sanctions make inroads toward their stated goals. Sure, less money means less weapons, probably, and the choice of suppliers becomes more limited, meaning costs are higher, and quality might suffer.
But Iranian sanctions have been in place for decades, with little to no changes in their government that the West would consider favorable. Cuban sanctions didn't do much "good". Russian sanctions haven't ended their war in Ukraine.
Sure, sanctions can serve to contain adversaries to some degree, and slow things down, but they don't seem to really do much positive. And their negative effect on goodwill and relations really sours longer-term diplomatic efforts. I do tend to feel like they have a net negative effect, most of the time.
Whats the alternative though? Just completely open the trade barriers as if those countries are not invading neighbouring, strategically important countries or committing human rights violations or engaging in war crimes or etc. etc.?
I mean, the US weapons companies could probably profit (massively?) from the removal of sanctions, but then the US essentially becomes complicit in those activities.
Sanctions allow for passive involvement; making the message clear without breaking sovereign borders.
> how wildly ineffective they are most of the time
I'm not sure it's possible to judge the effectiveness since we can't see both scenarios at once in order to compare. I have the gut feel that, considering what I wrote above, there's a fair level of visceral effectiveness in the reduction of growth of quality of life in those places. There's also the effectiveness of the population of "country applying the sanctions" knowing their government are on the "right" side of a right vs wrong fight - that's a kind of soft benefit, but there's a slight warm-fuzzy that the patriots get that's internally politically useful, and therefore effective in a certain way.
Making something difficult to acquire certainly doesn't stop the things from being acquired, but it staunches the flow, and that most definitely has an effect (and, separately, can flush out those facilitating sanctions evasion).
As an aside, and maybe on your side of the argument, is the sanctions on Russian oil/gas, and how we're still not entirely sure who blew up that pipeline because there seem to be valid arguments for it being done by either side (the US or Russia).
Lastly and more to your point than mine, sanctions on (Nvidia/)China for the export of GPU's over a certain 'power' seem laughably based on fear-of-fading-into-economic-obscurity; the late realisation of having lost a fight they organised and then didn't show up for.
The alternative is to do the opposite: Flood their market with cheap subsidized products that wreck their economy and drives them into economic dependency.
We cannot have a conflict with china because we are too dependent on them.
The Ukrainians blew it up.
https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/nord-stream-pipeline-explos...
I'd be really interested how you came to the conclusion that sanctions are ineffective.
Ineffective? Try engaging in sanctioned trade or trade with sanctioned people or entities and see how fast you end up on the list of sanctioned people or entities. Getting your name removed may take decades.
I had a similar issue with Hetzner. I host my downloads on a Hetzner cloud machine, and one of my customers reported that they couldn't download updates. Turns out their company used some enterprise security product named "Zscaler" that mis-identified the IP of my Hetzner VM as Iranian and blocked it.
My customer contacted Zscaler, and after a few days they unblocked it.
This feels like it could be related to the Iran IP address thing.
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41585249
Original article: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/gl-infra/production/-/issues/8...
Do sanctions really require blocking all access from Iranian IPs to sites hosted by a US provider? Don't they usually just require not doing business with people from sanctioned countries?
I suppose the company believes it's tough on evil this way.
see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41585249
In the light of latest events in Lebanon you don't want to be hosting Iranian content anyway, just in case your servers explode.