Last week a Brazilian court ordered the WhatsApp internet application shutdown in Brazil after the company refused to share certain data that the Brazilian government had requested.

For 12 hours, Brazilian netizens could not access their favourite social media platform, until another court ruled that the service should be restored.

The shutdown has sent shockwaves across Western capitals that subscribe heavily to the gospel of internet freedoms and human rights.

In Africa, where such freedoms are less understood, leave alone practiced, such a move would make far fewer headlines, if any.   

After all, during the Arab Spring uprising, Egypt and other North African nations did shut down the whole Internet – without any need to seek judicial leave.

The physical and software tools to shut down the Internet selectively or entirely in selected geographical regions are actually widely available.

In Kenya, a rogue government would simply send the boys in blue to physically clamp down on the Internet Exchange Points and data centres in Mombasa that physically connect Kenya and most of inland East Africa to the Internet.

TOTAL SHUTDOWN VS JUDICIAL REVIEW

A more sophisticated government would avoid such a low-level crude approach, however, and  perhaps deploy filtering software to block out selected websites, applications or services.

However, the net effect is likely to be the same, in that Kenyan netizens would not be able to access their addictive social media sites and many – suffering from withdrawal symptoms after being offline for more than two hours -- may be candidates for depression.

On a deeper level, the case of  Brazil vs WhatsApp brings out three contentious issues surrounding emerging technologies.

The first is the delicate balance between citizen privacy and national security. At what point is the state entitled to citizen private data and what are the proper  procedures for accessing it?

In developed democracies, the State would seek a judicial review with a court issuing the orders to access private citizen data. In dictatorships, the State can access private data anytime, anywhere without seeking judicial review.

Which brings in the second issue – geographical jurisprudence.  The borderless nature of the Internet makes it much more difficult for dictatorial states to enforce citizen surveillance.

WhatsApp, Facebook or Google keep their user data in the cloud and have stringent rules and procedures for releasing this data to governments and other interested parties.

A domestic court may therefore prefer to order a shutdown of the service within the local country domain rather than pursue the stringent channels of accessing user data domiciled in foreign countries.

ROPING IN THE COURTS

The third contentious issues with regard to the case is often played out between traditional telecommunication providers (Safaricom, Airtel, Orange, etc) and their Internet equivalent – content and application providers such as WhatsApp, Skype and Google.

Today, one can make free telephone calls over WhatsApp or Skype, meaning that traditional voice call providers lose the revenue they would have otherwise collected for each call routed over Skype instead of their mobile networks.

Traditional providers argue that they are heavily regulated and taxed within their specific country domain while they continue to invest heavily in expanding their network infrastructure.

Their Internet equivalents on the other hand are neither regulated nor taxed for offering their services on top of the traditional mobile network infrastructure.

Furthermore, they argue that these content providers do not build or expand existing network infrastructure but continue to collect revenues through advertising business models.  

Roping in courts to rule against content and application providers could be one strategy that traditional telecommunications providers utilise in order to gain an upper hand over the content providers or slow them down.

How to resolve the tensions between the traditional telecommunications providers and content and application providers remains contentious and will continue to shape ICT policy debates for the next couple of years.

Mr Walubengo is a lecturer at the Multimedia University of Kenya, Faculty of Computing and IT. Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.">This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., Twitter: @jwalu