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, 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.