September 20-2013
A US web-hosting company has shut down the website belonging to opposition figure Mehdi Karrubi, saying US sanctions do not allow it to host the site.
Reuters said the action underscored “the unintended impacts of some of the curbs imposed on the Islamic Republic.”
However, others said the closure was just the latest example of confused actions by Americans who think the sanctions shut off all dealings with Iranians. Perhaps the most extreme case arose a few years ago when an American store clerk refused to sell a cellphone to a woman when he learned she was Iranian-American.
In the latest case, hosting company Just Host shut down the Karrubi website in August, his former aide said.
Mohammad Hossein Ziya, the former aide who runs Karrubi’s website from the United States, said he received a notice in August from Just Host telling him it could no longer host Karrubi’s personal site, www.karroubi.ir.
In a letter to Ziya, which he showed to Reuters, the company cited sanctions imposed by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), the agency of the US Treasury Department that oversees sanctions.
“This sanction extends to include the country-code top level domains .IR, .SY, .KP, and .CU [Iran, Syria, North Korea, and Cuba],” the letter said. But many .ir sites are hosted in the West, including irna.ir, the site of the regime’s news agency, shana.ir, the news agency of the Oil Ministry, president.ir, which has now been turned over by former President Ahmadi-nejad to new President Rohani, and leader.ir, the website of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenehi.
Ziya said, “What’s frustrating is that on one hand, our sites are filtered inside Iran and so Iranian companies are fearful of providing services to us, and on another hand we face the sanctions. It’s like being caught in a pair of scissors.”
Deanne Dunne, a spokeswoman for Just Host’s parent company, Endurance International, told Reuters an OFAC general license excludes the provision of hosting services that are for purposes other than personal communications.
“We are subject to the OFAC regulations,” Dunne said in an email. “This means that we cannot provide paid-for web hosting services to residents of certain sanctioned countries, including Iran.”
Operating a website using the .ir domain involves importing services from Iran, which violates US sanctions, Clif Burns, a sanctions lawyer at Bryan Cave LLP in Washington, DC, told Reuters.
But sanctions also exempt “information” services so that books and magazines, not to mention films, from Iran can freely enter the United States.
Burns said OFAC would likely grant Ziya or the firm a license to run the site. “OFAC has said, generally speaking, it will grant such a license,” he said. “Once he has the licenses … the web hosting service ought to do it.”