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A judge in Sao Paulo has ordered WhatsApp to shut down for 48 hours, starting at 9PM Eastern tonight.
WhatsApp is the single most used app in Brazil, with about 93 million users, or 93% of the country's internet population. It's a particularly useful service for Brazil's youth and poor, many who cannot afford to pay the most expensive plans on the planet.
Brazilian telco's have been lobbying for months to convince the government that WhatsApp's voice service is unregulated and illegal (not entirely unlike the taxi industry's posture on Uber), and have publicly blamed the "WhatsApp effect" for driving millions of Brazilians to abandon their cell phone lines.
A WhatsApp shut-down would be akin to taking half the country off the electricity grid because of an industry squabble over the impending threat of solar power.
Update: Brazil court lifts suspension of Facebook's WhatsApp service
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Thursday December 17 2015, @02:30PM
The Brazilian government is generally in hot water these days. The country's credit rating has been downgraded. Thousands are in the streets demanding the impeachment of the president. Shutting off what millions of brazilians use on a daily basis for a stupid reason like this is a dangerous move. Recall how quickly the US govt backpedaled on SOPA when wikipedia and google went dark in protest.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 17 2015, @03:00PM
Thousands are in the streets demanding the impeachment of the president. Shutting off what millions of brazilians use on a daily basis for a stupid reason like this is a dangerous move.
You'd almost think that these would be related... but nah.... can't be...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Thursday December 17 2015, @06:31PM
The government seems completely in the pocket of the telcos.
The carriers are trying to shore up their messaging service against over the top services. In this country, most carriers have given up and just offer unlimited messaging as a bundled service.
The Brazilian telcos are simply 10 years behind the time, and they can do this only because they have the government firmly under control.
Not new:
This stuff is still going on in the US, but generally without the help of the government. AT&T has been forever at war with FaceTime, and only a couple days ago removed the last restriction [viraltalktime.com] on facetime on their network. Everybody else had removed it previously.
AT&T (and others) effectively blocked NFC payment methods on any phones (effectively Android only, because iPhone had no such capability at the time). They blocked it for years trying to get their own payment system in place but nobody would climb on their bandwagon and they essentially gave up.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 17 2015, @08:01PM
Every Brazilian knows what's the real reason for the shutdown: pro-impeachment movements were organizing through WhatsApp. The government wanted to crack down on the organizers of protests, WhatsApp didn't collaborate. The president already admitted publicly she'd rather watch the country burn to the ground than let the impeachment go forward.
(Score: 3, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Thursday December 17 2015, @08:25PM
Well, the motive attributed to this move didn't pass the sniff-test for me so I spent a couple seconds on Google news.
The rest of the media is reporting the cause of the shutdown as:
A São Paulo judge ordered the country’s telecommunications carriers to block WhatsApp for 48 hours, beginning Thursday, after the company failed to comply with the eavesdropping requests, which came as part of a criminal case.
That makes a lot more sense than "the incumbents didn't like it." Apparently, service has been restored already.
Now, whether you still consider this shutdown illegitimate is a different matter...