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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: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 17 2015, @04:11PM
from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-35125559 [bbc.co.uk]:
Judge Souza said it was "not reasonable that millions of users be affected by the inertia of the company".
Let me get this straight:
1. Company does not comply with the law (regardless of validity or desireability)
2. Company is punished for it
3. Judge says company shouldn't be punished because punishing it also punishes its 'customers'(/products)
4. Company ceases to be punished
Takeaway: if you have enough users(/products), you are above the law.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by isostatic on Thursday December 17 2015, @04:25PM
Takeaway: if you have enough users(/products), you are above the law.
Well if the majority of people don't want something to happen, surely you're just listening to the voice of democracy?
The problem here is that companies are simply too large and too walled-gardens. In the past if Shell broke the law and were blocked from selling gas, nobody would care because you just got your fuel at Chevron instead.
Now imagine if a large portion of the cars on the road only ran on BP fuel, and BP broke the law. The company is not only too big to fail, it's too big to punish.
That's a problem, and is the natural end state of capitalism.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 17 2015, @06:27PM
Ah, but the libertarians/ancaps/neoliberal-economists sophists have a casuistic explanation for that too! Any such failing of capitalism in the way you describe is only because the government was meddling. If the government was sufficiently small, this would never happen. If it happens, then the government isn't sufficiently small. QED. Since capitalism is perfect and always optimally efficient, any problems that appear to be caused by capitalism must be in actuality the result of exogenous forces and not an inherent flaw or contradiction in the perfection that is market capitalism.
(Score: 2) by BK on Thursday December 17 2015, @06:46PM
Part of the problem is that we punish these companies the wrong way. Fines have to be sized so that the companies can pay them without liquidation... and so there is no real punishment.
If instead we were willing to fine these companies in shares, we would only be limited by the value of the company. For example, BoA could be fined 10% of its value over something like the Robo-Signing scandal. This would allow the company to continue to operate (if it was too big / essential to shut down) while motivating shareholders to ensure that the people operating the company on their behalf do so by following the law.
...but you HAVE heard of me.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Thursday December 17 2015, @07:05PM
Easy way to fine them without affecting operations is to issue shares, distributed to the victims.
Doesn't affect the company's cash flow or profit and loss, just the share price.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday December 17 2015, @07:09PM
the inertia of the company
The company exhibiting inertia was Whatsapp.
They didn't cross his palms fast enough.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.