[_delirium]

Contempt of court in the U.S. escalates considerably beyond fines if the company doesn't start complying quickly. The court can jail the company's officers, issue an injunction forcing them to stop doing business, instruct customs to blockade them at the U.S. border (in the case of companies selling physical goods), and a range of other things.

[morgante]

Yes, that's all true.

But they don't compel third parties to block the company's app.

[dogma1138]

That's when it's a US company if it's foreign it will end up on the US trade department sanction list which will blacklist them world wide not only in the US and will prevent any entity which operates in the US from doing any sort of business with them.

There is nothing that a Brazilian judge can do to whatsapp other than to harm them financially cutting off 100m users even in a developing market sends a clear sign.

[morgante]

Facebook has an office in Brazil. I don't really understand why they couldn't just levy financial penalties, since Facebook does actually have a business presence in the country.

[dogma1138]

WhatsApp and Facebook are still separate legal entities as far as i know, the subpoena was issued to WhatsApp it didn't comply they've issued a court order to block it in order to compel it to comply. If a US company would not comply to a court order, a US judge can prevent the company from operating at all by freezing all of their assets and halting all of their operations.

[rmc]

You're presuming that that Facebook office in Brazil actually has a lot of assets in Brazil to seize. It's likely that it's a shell organisation and has nothing to seize.

[necessity]

Two wrongs make a right?

[dogma1138]

Where is the wrong here? When company does not cooperate you force it to do so by any means available to you.

[spacecowboy_lon]

"any means" is a slippery slope

[logicchains]

>When company does not cooperate you force it to do so by any means available to you.

Some people don't consider this "might makes right" morally compelling.

[dogma1138]

This isn't might makes right this is a corporation pissing over laws, if this was some oil company killing seals would you respond in the same manner?

WhatsApp provides a service in a country, they gain direct financial benefit from almost 100M users, they received a subpoena and ignored it because it's Brazil, if this would've been a European nation they would most likely have complied, if it were a US court order they would for sure have complied.

The only "might makes right" here is WhatsApp ignoring the subpoena because they are an almighty multi billion dollar US company which thinks it's above the law. And on the other side we know that there's pretty much no company on the planet that would dare to defy a US subpoena or court order.

Should only US and "western" nation's legal systems be respected? Is this some how morally compelling to you?

[guelo]

US government used coercion through unofficial back channels to force Amazon and Paypal to cutoff Wikileaks.

[CaptSpify]

And that was the wrong approach to that "problem" as well

[andreyf]

Why do you think it was the US government?