That doesn't make sense to me, letting people from those countries access resources on GCP does make Google money, since presumably Google will be paid by the website owner (which doesn't live in any of these countries) for the extra bandwidth/resources used by their website.
This is not much more far-fetched than the idea that a site like The Pirate Bay is guilty of "conspiring" with its users to infringe copyright.
"We're a piracy site, run by pirates, and we love piracy and pirates because of what piratical pirates we are, so we built a piracy site specially to cater to pirates and piracy! Also, we do not condone it in the slightest and built it for totally legitimate purposes, we promise!"
Yeah, gonna go with "no" on that one. It does not take an "imaginative" prosecutor to find the incredibly unbelievably subtle and deeply-hidden links between the Pirate Bay and its intended purpose.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IsoHunt#DMCA_takedown_notices
Of course the "intent" of the accused is something that a legal process can consider, but I've always been unimpressed with the argument of "It's right in the name!" when considering whether to censor The Pirate Bay. If they had changed their name to the "I Rate Bay", and branded themselves as a site for people to discuss and rate the quality of certain hex strings (magnet links), then, by the "It's right in the name!" argument, the site should be perfectly legal.
There were a number of factors which lead to the legal judgements against The Pirate Bay (across the multiple jurisdictions where the site is censored), but if the legality of a site were to come down to a single letter in its domain name, and not based at all on the actual functionality of the site, then I think that would put us in a very odd place in terms of freedom of speech and the enforceability of the law.
We're back to the "wine bricks" of the Prohibition era, with their "warning" not to leave the contents dissolved in a gallon of water in the cool cupboard for 21 days, to prevent "accidentally" creating wine:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/ingenious-brick-he...
The Oracle JRE contains strong cryptography which is illegal to export to certain sanctioned countries. It being free doesn't change anything about that. That one is actually legitimate.
Plus, is it really illegal to export cryptography software? If that is the case, why are Java downloads the only ones restricted? Shouldn't, for example, Visual Studio and .Net also be blocked? I don't think it is for any valid legal reason. Just that they cannot make money from these countries, so they can't be bothered to let them access their download servers.
Microsoft does not sell products to any sanctioned countries[2].
Note that [1] has a giant loophole for open source software, which requires notice but not permission - so builds of .NET Core, OpenJDK, OpenSSL itself, and so on, can be exported no problem. Also, programs built WITH the primitives are "mass market", so are exemptable that way.
[1]: https://www.bis.doc.gov/index.php/policy-guidance/encryption [2]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/exporting/faq.aspx
The don't earn money by letting packets from Iran route to their network; The people who could be losing money are their customers who's content is restricted.