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posted by cmn32480 on Thursday December 17 2015, @01:44PM   Printer-friendly
from the whatsapp-with-this-crap dept.

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


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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 17 2015, @03:26PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 17 2015, @03:26PM (#277706)

    Under communism, the government has absorbed the companies and you have one entity controlling everything.
    Under fascism, the companies have absorbed government and you have one entity controlling everything.
    These are, of course, completely different, and really hate each other. (See the Eastern Front, for example.)

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