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If these services don't block students from Iran, it may just be a matter of sloppiness rather than policy. When the sanctions started, our (Europe based) university was forced to remove Iranian postgrads from sciences like Physics, presumably to prevent them from gaining access to the kind of knowledge that ends up being published in magazines if it's any good. I don't see how it could serve any purpose other than to annoy and harass.

This university wasn't based in the US, but was threatened with sanctions: US based companies and institutions would have been banned from doing business with this Europe based university if they didn't comply. The irony is that US based universities are not restricted in this manner.