Brazil’s new bill, echoing (and in some ways exceeding) Europe’s model, highlights how expanding regulatory power over platforms can quietly reshape markets, information flows, and global influence.
For most of human history, gatekeepers determined what information reached the public — first the church, then the press, then broadcasters. Today, that power belongs to algorithms. Recommendation systems now decide what news people see – or don’t. Regulating those systems is, therefore, no longer a matter of market competition exclusively. It is a question of free speech.
And the next decisive move in the global campaign to tame Big Tech companies may come not from Brussels, Washington, or Beijing — but from Brasília.
For years, Europe has set the tone in digital regulation. The Digital Markets Act established the principle that some platforms are so large and so strategically placed that regulators need not wait for proven misconduct before imposing restrictions.
That idea is now spreading. Brazil’s proposed Digital Markets Bill, PL 4675/2025 (expected to be voted on in May or June), does more than borrow Europe’s template. In important respects, it improves upon Europe’s political ambition while discarding some of its restraint.
That should concern anyone interested in who will wield the power to shape the architecture of the digital public square.
The bill, introduced by President Lula’s administration and pushed rapidly through the legislative process, would allow Brazil’s antitrust authority, CADE, to designate certain firms as systemically relevant and subject them to special obligations through a new digital markets unit. The broad rationale is familiar: large platforms occupy bottleneck positions, and governments should be able to intervene before damage is done.
That case deserves serious debate. But Brazil’s proposal goes well beyond a narrow ex-ante framework aimed at preventing anti-competitive conduct. It creates something more elastic: a regime in which the practical scope of intervention will depend less on clear statutory limits than on administrative interpretation. This is the bill’s defining feature as well as its greatest danger.
Europe’s DMA is interventionist, but it is also relatively specific. It sets out an identifiable list of dos and don’ts for designated gatekeepers. Brazil’s bill is more open-ended. The obligations it contemplates are illustrative rather than exhaustive, giving regulators room to broaden the scope of intervention over time without returning to Congress. In other words, lawmakers would authorize a model whose real content may be determined later by bureaucratic discretion.
That is not a minor drafting choice, but a transfer of power.
The bill is also broader in operational reach than some of its foreign counterparts. Rather than targeting only a particular service or market where a concern arises, it appears to allow obligations to spill over into entire corporate groups and integrated ecosystems.
In digital markets, that matters enormously. Platforms do not operate as isolated products. They operate as systems: of search, advertising, communications, app distribution, cloud infrastructure, payments, logistics, and data. A regulator empowered to reach across that web is not merely correcting abuses, but acquiring leverage over how digital ecosystems are designed and governed.
And Brazil’s bill says that part out loud.
Most antitrust laws concern conduct: exclusionary contracts, self-preferencing, tying, discriminatory access, and predatory behavior. This proposal moves further upstream. It explicitly permits interventions in algorithms, ranking systems, interoperability structures, and data flows — the internal mechanics through which platforms determine visibility, prioritize services, and shape user choice.
That is the real story. In digital markets, design is not cosmetic. Design is power.
Recommendation systems and integrated services affect more than prices and convenience. They affect what people see and how information circulates — and these are the raw materials of public debate. When regulators can reshape these by decree, the implications extend well beyond market efficiency. Users have a right to receive information, and a regulatory regime empowered to rewrite the mechanics of visibility can also quietly suppress ideas that those in power find inconvenient. The line between correcting an algorithmic bias and imposing one is thinner than it appears.
This is why the old distinction between competition policy and information policy is becoming harder to sustain. Once regulators are empowered to redesign the mechanisms that organize visibility and access, they are no longer acting only as market referees. They are helping shape the environment through which economic and informational life flows.
The geopolitical implications are equally important. The companies most likely to be designated under PL 4675/2025 are not Brazilian firms. They are overwhelmingly American. The bill is not openly protectionist; it does not impose tariffs or formal barriers to entry. But it would give a domestic authority in one of the world’s largest democracies continuing power over the design and operation of foreign platforms that function as essential infrastructure in the local economy.
That is a subtler, more modern form of power. It works not by excluding foreign firms, but by governing the conditions under which they may operate.
Europe pioneered this model. The so-called Brussels effect showed that regulatory decisions taken in one large jurisdiction can become de facto global rules, because firms often find it easier to adapt products broadly than maintain different systems for different markets. Brazil may now be pointing to a next stage: not only the international diffusion of digital regulation, but the spread of a more discretionary and interventionist version of it. And if discretionary control over platform design diffuses across democracies, so does discretionary influence over what citizens see and read.
The Brasília effect, if it takes hold, would not only export a regulatory model — it would export a new architecture of speech. This matters especially because Brazil is not China or Russia. It is a large Western democracy. Its choices, therefore, carry a kind of legitimacy that authoritarian regulatory models do not. If Brazil normalizes a regime of open-ended authority over platform conduct and design, other democracies may find it easier to do the same.
Defenders of the bill will say that extraordinary market concentration demands extraordinary tools. Perhaps. But Brazil already has competition laws that allow preventive and corrective action based on evidence, including remedies and interim measures. The move toward a structural designation regime is not simply a technical necessity but a political choice to expand the timing, scope, and flexibility of state intervention.
That choice may prove costly. For firms, it means compliance under uncertainty, where the rules are less fixed than continually interpreted. For markets, it means greater fragmentation and slower innovation. For users, it means decisions about visibility, access, and integration moving further away from open competition and closer to bureaucratic management.
The deeper issue is not whether digital platforms should be regulated. They already are, and they will be more so. The real question is who will write the rules of the global internet and how much discretion they will claim in doing it.
Silicon Valley still builds many of the world’s most important platforms. But increasingly, others, including governments, are deciding how those platforms must work. And the rules that govern how platforms work are, ultimately, the rules that govern what billions of people can say, see, and share. Whoever holds open-ended power over platform design holds power over the architecture of global expression.
That is the Brasília effect.
Por Jamil Assis | Diretor Institucional do Sivis
Texto reproduzido do The Bedrock Principle. Leia a publicação original.
