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Comment by onli | Hacker News Reader

How is that related to what is happening here? To fine a company for not getting that a company can't provide data it does not have is incompetence, not an act of sovereignty.

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the case was in 2015 before whatsupp implemented encryption.

+ they failed to even reply.

I hope they go much further if they continue to not obey other countries' laws.

WhatsApp claims they never stored the messages. So it'd be akin to asking them to write a backdoor. Right?

The US courts tend to dislike willful ignorance. Why do you expect Brazilian ones to be different?

To fine a company (and some variants, like Google) in a strike of years and receive the same answer always is indeed an act against brazillian sovereignty.

And now Brazil is going to find out how little the rest of the internet cares about their sovereignty claims in this particular case. This is pure win for Whatsapp; Brazilian revenue is less for FB/WA than in most countries given the lingering zombie corpse of Orkut, so it does not cost as much to tell the Brazilian courts to piss off and gain street cred in markets they actually do care about.

Orkut is a non-factor in Brazil currently and has been for years now.

Facebook and whatsapp is used by basically everyone who has internet access [1][2]

Edit: Of course number of users does not imply in revenue, but the Facebook office in Brazil is also a gateway to other Latin American countries. So I would argue that the country might not be as unimportant as you seem to imply.

[1]http://www.statista.com/statistics/268136/top-15-countries-b...

[2]http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/05/03/whatsapp-sh...

Apart from (and maybe due to) its declining popularity in Brazil, Orkut was ultimately shut down by Google:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orkut

I second this . Was visiting Brazil for the new year and was kind of astonished to see whatsApp logos on store fronts along with store phone number.

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