World of Warcraft: Does the Internet have controllable Borders?

World of Warcraft is an online game played by millions of players around the globe since Blizzard launched it in 2004. All you need is a computer, internet connection and a subscription, you play in a fantasy virtual world long with hundreds of other players at the same. This game is fun and highly social, but very addictive with typical players logging hundreds of hours play over a span of years. Players regard their online accounts and characters as very 'precious' due to the number of hours building character skills and abilities, and time acquiring in-game items.

Last week (22nd Aug 2012) Iranian players started to complain on a Blizzard forum that they couldn't access the World of Warcraft servers, unless they went through a proxy server outside of their country.  After many more complaints from Iranian players and several days had past, Blizzard explained they had to take action to block all Iranian World of Warcraft players to due the US's economic sanctions against the country.

What we can tell you is that United States trade restrictions and economic sanction laws prohibit Blizzard from doing business with residents of certain nations, including Iran. Several of you have seen and cited the text in the Terms of Use which relates to these government-imposed sanctions. This week, Blizzard tightened up its procedures to ensure compliance with these laws, and players connecting from the affected nations are restricted from access to Blizzard games and services. - Blizzard

Another report claims that Iranian government may have had Warcraft blocked due to it's promotion of "superstition and mythology", either way a lot of Iranian players were peeved.

What does this ban tell us?
Attempting to impose physical world rules against the Internet, which is a virtual world, is an imposition which is always doomed to failure. Iranian World of Warcraft gamers are still playing World of Warcraft today despite this ban, the first player making the complaint on the forum managed to circumnavigate the Iranian barred access to the World of Warcraft game servers by accessing the servers via Internet proxy server.

In the World of Information Security, we operate increasingly more in the virtual than the physical, more so as outsourcing to the cloud is coming to the fore. You may have your server surrounded by waves of attack dogs and under 50 feet of steel enforced concrete within a bunker, but interconnectivity to the server brings it and it's data into the virtual world, where different thinking about threats and different counter measures are required.