Not at all. When companies decline to obey local law, it's reasonable for them to be cut off from operating in that country. Which is what the judge is proposing, temporarily. Probably with longer cutoffs to follow if this doesn't inspire obedience of judicial orders.
Obeying duly authorized warrants or subpoenas is very reasonable. It's really not WhatsApp's job or right to pass judgement on the political system of a country. If WhatsApp doesn't like that, they should withdraw their business from Brazil.
And let's be serious; while Brazil may have problems, it's definitely not a dictatorship.
> Obeying duly authorized warrants or subpoenas is very reasonable.
Depends on the warrant or subpoena and the technology in question. If they have plaintext messages sitting around on a server somewhere, then perhaps they can supply the messages they've irresponsibly given themselves access to. However, WhatsApp claims to provide end-to-end encryption in some (though not all) cases, so they may not have the data in question; if so, a subpoena expecting them to supply it anyway wouldn't be reasonable. A subpoena expecting them to backdoor their client (in general or for a specific user) would not be reasonable.
And that's before getting into the "why" of the individual case, such as whether this has any more merit than the "take down this YouTube video because it embarrasses us" cases that caused Brazil to attempt to block YouTube previously.
Apart from that, a subpoena from a country only has legal meaning to a business with a legal nexus in that country. Providing a service via the Internet does not create a legal nexus in every country in the world.
> If WhatsApp doesn't like that, they should withdraw their business from Brazil.
What business in Brazil? I haven't seen anything in the stories or comments thus far to suggest that they have any legal nexus in Brazil. They have customers all over the world.
