[vincvinc]

"All his accounts with US companies such as Amazon, Airbnb, or PayPal were immediately closed by the providers. Online bookings, such as through Expedia, are immediately canceled, even if they concern hotels in France."

How is this legal / OK?

[marcosdumay]

The Law requires that they do it if their (the US) government demands.

If you are asking how it's OK, it's not. It's wrong on many different levels. But it's legal (or at least the US has laws that mandate that same thing, I don't know if they were the ones applied here).

[vkou]

A US company is free to cut off service to whatever foreigner it wants, just like a foreign country is free to ban whatever US firm it wants from operating in it.

[jatsek]

Please look up what happened to Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras or Costa Rica when they tried banning whatever US firm they wanted.

[lucb1e]

Can you link an article or at least mention some more keywords? A super vague search query based on this information, like "costa rica banning us firm consequences", isn't turning up anything that sounds relevant

[vkou]

The EU has more weight than Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, Cuba, or Grenada.

[HDThoreaun]

They all freed themselves from their captors and became sovereign countries?

[hn_acker]

The US government is not free to use frivolous sanctions to indirectly make payment processors stop serving a foreigner.

[gusfoo]

> The US government is not free to use frivolous sanctions to indirectly make payment processors stop serving a foreigner.

You may regard them as such, but they are not in any sense frivolous. It is the law that if-x-then-y, it's not a discretionary item that one interprets. And to be clear, these are not "indirectly" making payment processors stop serving the person, it is very clearly direct and you do not, as a company, have a choice in the matter.

[vkou]

1. The law in question does not compel the US Government to bend over backwards to protect foreign nationals from prosecution for war crimes.

2. The US Government plays incredibly fast and loose with laws that compel foreign policy from it. If its adherence to them is discretionary, you can absolutely piss on it for being discretionary in this case.

[pessimizer]

It definitely is.

[layer8]

Companies are generally free to choose who they are doing business with.

[juliangmp]

They quite literally aren't in this case. They would get fined heavily if they did business with him.

[MichaelZuo]

Pretty much all companies only offer accounts without any guarantees, that can be realistically closed on a whim without any mandatory notice period.

The only exceptions are the high end enterprise accounts.

[hn_acker]

Companies can voluntarily close accounts for almost any reason or no reason. The US government needs a legal justification for forcing companies to close an account.

[xmcqdpt2]

The legal justification literally is “we put this person on the sanction list because national security.” The sanction process is basically its own legal justification.

[MichaelZuo]

How is this relevant to my comment?

I didn’t claim any company received a binding order to do this or that?