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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) 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.