Tidbit on brazilian reality
This article covered nicely the underlying reason of the ban that happened yesterday. Our marco civil law was supposed to leverage the playing field and guarantee data isonomy to anything - telcos would only be responsible to get data from point A to point B.
However, Amos Genish (Vivo's CEO) goes constantly on media to say how whatsapp is a pirate service (really, just google the combination of "his name", "vivo" "whatsapp" and "pirata"), as it provides text and voice services without being regulated like the ISP's or telcos utilizing their infrastructure, phone number AND not paying any kind of fees. The other telcos are kinda meh about it and go as far as "breaking data isonomy" by making whatever you use with the application free - that means in most of then you have a normal data plan and unlimited access to whatsapp. Our Bahia's state MP (Public Ministery) went as far as "investigating" the Tim telco about it's unlimited access deal, with ground as to why "you're prioritizing some kind of data over another". Surprisingly, they said they give customers some advantages and better deals... and it worked! Since then, Claro and Oi also followed suit, integrating facebook, twitter and whatsapp usage in their consumer plans. By the way, Vivo still refuses to do that kind of deal and keep going to the media against those apps.
It's all fine and dandy, but we all know telcos would LOVE to tap on that lost SMS/voice call revenue, and go as far as to lobby our politicians to harden the instance on those apps, claiming "they can't expand or provide better service because we are not profitting as much as back in the day" yadda-yadda.. which is weird, considering their profits go up year after year (http://www.teleco.com.br/opcelular.asp). Our regulation agency (Anatel) does a fairly good job at keeping things in a sane level and are not easing politics bs into the life of the every-day-and-unaware-consumer, which is a good thing.
But how all of this came to be? Simple - price gouging. When I got my 1st cellphone in 2003, the minute cost of a call was ~R$1,80 to the same telco and R$2,70+ to others. SMS were around R$0,70 each and kept decreasing a little bit and being incorporated by whichever plan you choose (in the end, you still paid like R$20 for your SMS's for a "normal" plan). A unlimited plan goes above R$500 here, while the minimum wage is R$788, and you can't even rent a livable place for less than R$800 on most big cities. Then whatsapp, viber, telegram and etc all came along, making people stop using those expensive services and utilizing our broadband infrastructure to get our communications needs filled with the help of those apps, hence why all the hate.
The landscape is finally changing for the better on that regard - Tim and Oi waived fees and made any call to any telco a fixed and sane price (at Tim I pay R$0,75 for the 1st call I make and every call is "free" for the rest of the day), proving that it's still possible to profit from those services without gouging your customers. Claro and Vivo are still on the old business model, but profits are still going up, so do w/e is working out for you, I guess.