Cláudio de Oliveira Santos Colnago

On February 2015, a Brazilian judge from the state of Piauí issued an order to a large number of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) with a common goal: to suspend the application known as Whatsapp and, therefore, impede its users from communicating through the popular text-messaging app. The preliminary ruling was rapidly suspended on an appeal granted by the local state court, but the fact is that the broad scope of the order raised a lot of doubts regarding how judges in Brazil are to interpret the rules established by the Civil Framework for the Internet, Federal Statute 12.965/2014, known popularly as “Marco Civil”.