It doesn't matter it's not a Brazilian company, there are no servers in Brazil, only the users exist in Brazil. They could mandate Mark Zuckerberg run around naked and it would make no difference. Maybe Brazil should create a great wall of Brazil and cut itself off of the internet. Then it could enact whatever laws it wants to affect companies in other countries.

Facebook has at least one company in Brazil, and they are providing a service in Brazil that this judge ordered to interrupt.

It's perfectly reasonable to forbid access to Brazil for some service that does not follow a Brazilian law. This is bad because of the specific terms of this law, not because of some broad issue.

> providing a service in Brazil

I don't know if they have servers in brazil, but if they don't then it seems quite unreasonable to say that they are "providing a service in Brazil". If you run a bookstore in the US and a German comes and buys Nazi material, are you running a store in Germany? If Brazilians are effectively leaving their country to go get stuff from US servers then it's up to the Brazilian government to make a law to stop them, if it doesn't like that. Saying that connecting to the internet is "providing service" to every country in the world is a way to simply break the entire internet.

>If you run a bookstore in the US and a German comes and buys Nazi material, are you running a store in Germany?

No, but if she buys via mail order and the package gets confiscated at the border, don't whine about losing business.

Under German law you are subject to German laws about commerce if you are "addressing the German market". Some indicators include offering your site in German, probably also support German phone numbers and addresses, etc. For some services/apps this is obvious (e.g. online shopping) for others it is more debatable.

The most important part however is that of course you don't have to give a damn about what German law thinks as long as you aren't in a position in which German jurisdiction can be enforced. Likewise, even if you are a German citizen living in Germany some German laws and regulations may not apply if you are decidedly not offering your services/apps to a German audience -- though of course that's a much less safe position. Either way, it's not as simple as "it exists on the Internet, therefore it falls under German jurisdiction" although the reasoning is quite similar to that in Brazil.

The point is moot, anyway. Brazil can't enforce their laws against a US company that doesn't have a presence in Brazil, but it can ban them from Brazil -- as apparently a Brazilian court is allowed to force Internet access providers to ban specific IPs. Whether courts should be allowed to do that is a legitimate question but right now in Brazil they apparently are, so everything is fine.

This isn't an action against WhatsApp. This is an action against Brazilian WhatsApp users. It's basically enforcing a sanction against WhatsApp by preventing Brazilians from accessing the service (which they can't get at otherwise). This is more like a German court forcing an IP ban (in Germany) against a Nazi website hosted outside of Germany -- which is a thing.

All that law orders them to do is to record the access logs (Registros de Acesso), not the actual messages or any other metadata. Soneca's post above said the judge "ordered Whatsapp to share a particular user conversation", which that law doesn't oblige them to record.

This investigation is under seal. Soneca is speculating just as much as I am.

That is the law Watsapp broke the last two times it was interrupted (when the news was almost a verbatim copy of what it is now). I imagine it is the same it is breaking now.

Yes, I should have made it clearer.