Redstate

If Americans don't like what Yahoo, Google, Cisco, and others do, then they can vote with their dollars.  Private boycotts are the way to go to express displeasure with this stuff.

For the Congress to attempt to project its power beyond our shores, and dictate business practices in other countries, couldn't possibly end well.

If the Congress is worried about Red China, let them renew their support for Taiwan, and ensure that our armed forces remain strong and ready to fight.  If necessary, cut some pork spending and use that to raise military pay.

The US has been extending their powers beyond our shores where business is concerned for years. It dictates the type and specification for IT hardware that it allows us to sell to countries with different political statuses. If a software allowed you to effectively track and plan suicide bombings, would you enjoy government complicity in an American company selling it overseas? While these companies aren't anywhere near that, the point is that an American corporation that aids and abets purposes that are against the best interests of America and it's people should be stopped from doing so. Corporations by their definition exist to serve the public interest, and bowing and assisting in propping up oppressive regimes doesn't serve us very well.

Has government enforced embargo ever resulted in a foreign policy win?

Cuba - still communist

Vietnam - still communist

North Korea - still run by a wack job

Iraq - run by maniacal murderer until the military tossed him out.

While Yahoo should rightly be criticised for cooperating with the Chinese government to put people in jail (for free expression) simply providing a product (even a partial product) shouldn't be frowned upon.  Google, Cisco and Microsoft make the Chinese lives better - Yahoo would too if they stopped getting people put in jail.

USSR

(trade restrictions were part of the overall economic pressure program of reagan alomg with the defense build up, missiles in europ, cut off of grain, and confrontations in s amer and africa come to mind,)

 but I do suspect that israel will have to demolish them eventually, ala dresden, given the 40 yrs of educating their children that jews are animals that cook with their own blood and deserve to die. They run the country now.

peace usually only follows victory that the defeated recognize as such

There are lots of people out there who have written all kinds of powerful software that can be perverted to evil aims.

Cryptography, data processing, internet communications, financial planning and management, anonymous data distribution, geolocation, and more could all be used by terrorists and their supporters.

The same goes for hardware.  The powerful router that a library uses to block pornography, or a company uses to protect itself from outside attackers, can be used by Communists or Islamofacists to censor the political parts of the Internet.

We tried blocking stuff once already.  We had absurd controls on cryptographic export.  The result was that Americans ended up using encryption inferior to that used in much of the rest of the world, because American companies designed their products for export, while companies outside the US were free of those controls.

That's right: amazingly enough, we're not the only company in the world capable of implementing plans.  And the plans were available; that pesky first amendment prevents export controls from protecting the scientific and engineering information necessary for the building blocks of computer infrastructure.

So the controls you're talking about are pointlessly harmful.  They hurt Americans without hurting the oppressors you're trying to hurt.

Several applications I've written have been published in Red Flag Linux, a Chicom OS.

But if mine hadn't been available, someone else's would have been.  And if nothing from America would have been available, something from Europe would have been.