They probably don't block on nationality as such, but on something like:
- Creation IP geocodes to Iran
- More than X% of the requests in last Y years came from IPs that geocode to Iran.
Just blocking requests from Iranian IPs will achieve nothing except move those users to proxies and VPNs. If the lawyers have decided that there needs to be a technical solution, they probably need to go with one that's not totally trivial to work around.
The alternative option would be some kind of proxy/VPN detection (which I assume Microsoft must have technology for already). But it seems particularly ill-suited for Github's business, since they must get a ton of valid traffic from datacenter IPs.
- Creation IP geocodes to Iran
- More than X% of the requests in last Y years came from IPs that geocode to Iran.
Just blocking requests from Iranian IPs will achieve nothing except move those users to proxies and VPNs. If the lawyers have decided that there needs to be a technical solution, they probably need to go with one that's not totally trivial to work around.
The alternative option would be some kind of proxy/VPN detection (which I assume Microsoft must have technology for already). But it seems particularly ill-suited for Github's business, since they must get a ton of valid traffic from datacenter IPs.