I'm not in the US but still use America Online's chat service. I also use the Israel-based ICQ protocol, although I'm not very Israel-friendly nowadays either. I don't think this should be a _political_ issue, really. Companies can be good/bad and from "good/bad" countries, what I do is I look at the quality of an application and the use I get from it. ICQ was the first widely used instant messaging app on the 'net, and I still have quite a few contacts on there. I very, very rarely do MSN. But not because of political issues, but rather because the app is butt-ugly. I don't do Adium/Fire etc. anymore, because they simply don't support the networks' full feature sets that I need.
Year after year I hope that _someone_ would come up with a standard for instant messaging - period. Right now, we really live in a compatibility-flawed environment. "Can I IM you?" - "Yes, but you have to be on MSN." - "Erh... No, I don't want to install yet another client. I'm on ICQ, AIM and Yahoo." - "No, I only have MSN. And Skype." - "What about Google Talk?" - "Ugh..."
The multi-chatter apps like Adium and Fire address this problem to some extent, but I still think it's overall a bad state this "protocol" is in.