Emerging South

They did it with Youtube, and now they plan to do it with wordpress.com.  Leonardo Fontes has a good piece on the matter.  Contrary to the Youtube block, which Youtube won (of course), there is no concrete event for the legal order from March to shut down Wordpress in Brasil.

My analysis is that this is simply a matter of protectionism.  Wordpress is the 27th most visited domain in Brazil (worldwide Wordpress is the 49th most visited site), with more than 1,6 million Brazilian users active on Wordpress.  Especially since the recent Wordpress upgrade, the service is becoming steamy hot amongst Brazilians.   Meanwhile, all Brazilian media players offer Blog services.   Wordpress has no office in Brazil.  In sharp contrast to Google (and thus Youtube) which has a massive presence in Brazil.

The motivation for blocking Wordpress is thatr simple: Brazil doesn't like to have 1,6 million of its citizens speak free on a platform ran from the US with no legal entity in Brazil and not paying taxes or labor contribution in the country.  It just takes one phone call form media Brazilian media boss (like UOL) to a Brazilian judge to motivate the judge for the closure of Wordpress.

My advice to wordpress: open an office in Sao Paulo, quick !