Iran Flips on Facebook; Microsoft Blocks Messenger in Syria, Iran

Governments continue to prove that they have only the slightest clue about how the Internet and especially Web 2.0 works. But the news also includes a rather mystifying (at least to me) move by Microsoft.

Last Saturday, while I was out of town, Iran banned access to Facebook. The Iranian reformists supporting Mir-Hossein Musavi for President quickly said this was aimed at them and was a ploy by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to prevent the oppositionm from mobilizing the young. Ahmadinejad, asked the question — it's worth remembering that there is questioning of candidates going on, given the demonization of Iran in the West — reportedly said that websites need not be blocked, and now Facebook access has been restored.

It's easy enough to see this as another instance of a clumsy authoritarian government not understanding the technology, or of a blunder on the part of the incumbent regime to block an opposition candidate (who is, of course, also a longtime player in the regime). In that sense it may seem like the sort of thing we see all the time, such as a recent Egyptian court decision ordering the blockage of "obscene" websites. It may work, up to a point, but in the end it is very hard to completely control the Internet unless the government is the sole Internet provider (as it is in many Arab countries), and then the blockages are often more political than moral.

A bit harder to figure out is the announcement that Microsoft has decided to block Microsoft Messenger access to Cuba, Syria, Iran, Sudan, and North Korea. Another report here. I haven't found Microsoft's official announcement yet but all the reports so far indicate that the reason is that all these countries are under US sanctions of one sort or another. A couple of quick points come to mind:

• Huh? The United States imposed sanctions on trade with Cuba in 1962. Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft in 1975. This is 2009. What just changed? If some lawyer decided that US embargoes made providing Messenger to these countries illegal, why now, 47 years after sanctions were placed on Cuba?
  

• I rather doubt that anyone outside of the government elite in North Korea is using Microsoft Messenger, or for that matter modern plumbing. It's probably got a limited audience at best in Cuba and Sudan. But Syria and Iran are a bit different: both have Internet cultures of a sort. And as noted above, Facebook has become something of a campaign issue in Iran.
  

• Wait a minute here! Isn't the purpose of our embargoes to encourage democracy in the countries we impose sanctions on? If so, wouldn't an Instant Messaging service — assuming the country does not itself ban access to it — facilitate that? If I were the US government's I'd airdrop instant messaging software in every hostile country on earth, and if some sort of government pressure is behind Microsoft's decision, that's stupid. As Mr. Bumble put it in Dickens' Oliver Twist: "If the law supposes that… the law is a ass—a idiot."
  

• Those of us who have fond memories of Word Perfect and Netscape and still use Firefox have long suspected that Microsoft is evil. This tends to be further evidence in support, but I suspect there's some sort of government lawyer behind this decision, and that suggests that the government doesn't have a clue. I have little concern about North Korea here, which doesn't want outside information anyway (and given the fact that it appears as a black hole in night photos from space, I rather doubt there are many computers unless powered by hamsters), and I don't think there's a huge Internet culture in Sudan, but Iran and Syria are genuinely in play in the era of Web 2.0, and blocking Microsoft Messenger there is somewhere between silly and downright self-defeating.

• And the timing question plagues me. We're trying to open up our dealings with Syria and hoping to improve things with Iran, after all. As for Cuba, not only has this Administration eased the embargo a bit, but we recognize, I think, that it's an anachronism. So why, 47 years after sanctions were imposed, 34 years after Microsoft was founded and well into the Instant Messaging age, do Microsoft or its lawyers decide that the embargo requires blocking Instant Messaging in Cuba? Why now? Anybody have any ideas that don't involve incredibly dense lawyers?

Multiple Takes (Mostly Favorable) on the Iran Deal

With opponents of the Iran nuclear agreement being quite vocal right now,  I thought I'd collect some of the more reasonable discussions, especially by Iran experts and Israelis who back the deal.

• The Iran Project, "Statement by National Security Leaders on the Announcement of a Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action."
•  Robin Wright, The New Yorker, "Tehran's Promise: The revolution's midlife crisis and the nuclear deal."
• Shibley Telhami, Reuters, "Netanyahu steered U.S. toward war with Iran – the result is a deal he hates."
•  Americans for Peace Now, "Israeli Nuclear/Security Experts on the Iran Deal." I had already bookmarked many of these individually, such as Avner Cohen and Chuck Freilich, but the APN offers a great selection of quotes and links to Israeli supporters of the deal.
• Anthony H. Cordesman, "The Iran Nuclear Agreement and Conventi0onal Arms Transfers in the Gulf." Cordesman focuses not on the nuclear aspects but on the existing dominance of GCC arms purchases in the conventional sphere.

Finally, if all the heavy reading starts to get to you, Lebanese satirist karl Sharro explains it all at The Atlantic: "The Confused Peron's Guide to the Iran Deal: How the Arab Street Views the Agreement, in One Simple Diagram." [I'll let you click through to see the one "simple" diagram, but the fifth paragraph quoted below summarizes it in one extremely run-on sentence]:

In recent days, some Arab leaders have warned darkly about the consequences of the new nuclear agreement with Iran. But how controversial is the deal in Arab countries, really? How do Arabs feel?

As ever in situations like this, the media has proven indispensable in capturing what the “Arab Street” thinks about the deal. In The Independent, Robert Fisk went a step further and tried to imagine what Arabs think based on his long experience in the region, arguing with typical nuance and subtlety that “the Arabs at least will suspect the truth: that the Americans have taken the Shia Muslim side in the Middle East’s sectarian war.”

To investigate these portrayals of the Arab view of the deal, journalists affiliated with the Institute of Internet Diagrams spent hours in the legendary Arab Street itself. As every foreign reporter in the region knows, the best way to get to the Arab Street is to get in a taxi anywhere in the Arab world and ask to be driven to “the street.” (Don’t say the “Arab Street,” because it’s assumed.) 

The Arab Street is not as grand as you might imagine. It’s quite narrow and crowded, but it’s full of life, and the scent of spices wafts across it at regular intervals to ensure foreign correspondents are in the right frame of mind. Head straight to the busiest café; booking a table in advance will give customers time to put on traditional clothes for a more authentic feel.

Word on the Arab Street is that Barack Obama signed a nuclear deal with Iran so that he can extract concessions over Syria in return for Iran being allowed to control Iraq and for which it has to rein in the Houthis in Yemen to pacify the Saudis and simultaneously restrain Kurdish ambitions thus easing Turkey’s anxiety about Kurdish independence as an incentive for it to cooperate regionally allowing both Saudi Arabia and Turkey to come on board with Obama’s plan for Israel/Palestine which will also appease Egypt allowing it to play a bigger role in Libya to control the southern shores of the Mediterranean reducing migrant flows into Europe to ease the pressure on Greece and Italy for which Europe agrees to soften its stance against Russia allowing for a solution in Ukraine that allows NATO to maintain a presence in the East without threatening Russia which will be rewarded by removing the international sanctions against it allowing it to increase its trade with Europe.