Brazil Points the Way Forward for Competition Policy and Digital Sovereignty in the Global South

Paulo Henrique de Oliveira is Chief of Staff at the Tribunal of CADE, the Brazilian competition authority, and a researcher at CEDIS (Center for Law, Internet and Society) at IDP.

In mid-September, the Brazilian government presented the Digital Brazil Agenda, a comprehensive program aimed at creating regulatory mechanisms and economic incentive policies for the country’s digital environment and economy. The agenda is structured around three core initiatives: the sanctioning of the Digital Child and Adolescent Statute (ECA Digital); the submission to Congress of the Digital Fair Competition Bill (PL 4675/2025); and the issuance of a Provisional Measure Establishing the Redata, a special tax and infrastructure regime to stimulate investments in domestic data centers and digital infrastructure, with requirements for R&D investments, sustainability, and development of local market capacities.

In addition to these flagship actions, the package includes several complementary measures, such as the transformation of the National Data Protection Authority (ANPD) into an autonomous agency with enforcement powers under the ECA Digital, alongside other instruments designed to strengthen Brazil’s regulatory ecosystem for digital markets and services. These measures, including the antitrust bill, were even cited by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in his historic opening speech at the UN General Assembly two weeks ago.

Among these initiatives, the Digital Fair Competition Bill deserves special attention. It proposes the establishment of a framework within CADE, Brazil’s competition authority, to deal specifically with the challenges of digital markets. The bill introduces a designation process for platforms of systemic relevance, coupled with obligations designed to guarantee transparency, interoperability, and non-discrimination. Its development stemmed from a public consultation led by the Ministry of Finance in 2024, which collected contributions from over 70 participants across different sectors and countries. The result was a draft that reflects both international experience and domestic institutional priorities, signaling Brazil’s intention to adapt competition law tools to the dynamics of the digital economy.

The Digital Fair Competition Bill is conceived as a flexible regulatory tool, not one targeting platforms by nationality, but instead aimed at structuring a more equitable digital market. Grounded in broad consultation and sustained coordination between the Ministry of Finance and CADE, it ensures that small users and businesses can exercise meaningful choice in the digital economy. The proposal seeks to rebalance asymmetries by imposing obligations only on platforms that meet strict qualitative and quantitative criteria, thereby ensuring proportionality while advancing competition.

Taken together, the Digital Brazil Agenda inserts the country into the broader global debate on building regulatory capacity for the digital economy. Around the world, governments have pursued different models: the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), the US’s litigation-driven antitrust cases, and Asia’s varied approaches to competition and data governance. Each experiment reflects distinct institutional realities, but all speak to a growing recognition that digital markets demand new regulatory frameworks.

Contending with concentrations of power

This recognition arises from the broader context of the global digital economy, where power is highly concentrated. The influence of a few platforms—most of the based in Silicon Valley—extends well beyond traditional competition dynamics, shaping industrial development, data flows, and even social structures. This concentration raises pressing questions about how regulatory systems can address new risks and mitigate the societal impacts of digital dominance.

In emerging economies, these challenges are compounded by asymmetries in capacity. Big Techs absorb local economic and intellectual resources—data, knowledge, and innovation—while reinforcing global hierarchies. As a result, local businesses, developers, and states often find themselves dependent on external orchestrators, which restricts policy space for developing sovereign digital strategies.

These dynamics appear even starker when compared to the struggles of advanced economies. In the US, for example, despite a landmark antitrust ruling against Google, remedies have remained modest and lag behind the pace of digital concentration. In Europe, the enforcement of the DMA has faced technical and political hurdles, as platforms frame their market practices as inherent features of innovation, technical imperatives, or necessary consumer conveniences. The mixed results in these core jurisdictions highlight the limitations of antitrust as a stand-alone solution to structural concentration.

For developing countries, the task is even more formidable. Designing alternative regulatory regimes requires overcoming constraints of institutional capacity, polarized political debates over digital governance, and the peripheral role these markets play in the strategic planning of Big Tech firms. Yet, markets like Brazil’s are highly relevant: the vast majority of Brazilians access the internet primarily via mobile devices, and social platforms play an outsized role in commerce, communication, and public life. These factors make the governance of digital markets in Brazil functionally crucial for both the country’s economy and the broader health of the global internet.

These longstanding difficulties are amplified by an increasingly complex geopolitical context. Earlier this year, the United States imposed tariffs on Brazil, with the official justification citing concerns over freedom of expression, framed against the backdrop of Brazil’s Supreme Court actions to curb misinformation. These measures included the suspension of X (formerly Twitter) in 2024 and the 2025 revision of the Marco Civil da Internet, Brazil’s landmark internet framework law that established user rights and intermediary liability rules. Later, the US president went further, declaring that countries seeking regulatory alternatives for digital markets and services—understood as discriminatory—would be met with economic retaliation. Such moves underscore the extent to which digital regulation is now entangled with trade and foreign policy disputes.

Brazil’s motivations

Why, then, pursue the construction of robust regulatory tools, particularly in antitrust, given these obstacles? Four motivations stand out.

First, it is clear that traditional antitrust enforcement cannot alone resolve structural concentration. Building regulatory capacity means not just enhancing oversight, but also creating infrastructural tools that enable states to shape digital markets at their core. This includes developing technological infrastructure, investing in data governance frameworks, and constructing alternative systems of digital intermediation that reduce dependency on global incumbents.

Recent studies on intellectual monopolies highlight that regulatory capacity is fundamentally tied to the ability of states to contest the monopolization of knowledge, data, and other intangibles. Developing economies need tools that both discipline dominant actors and empower domestic ecosystems, reducing vulnerabilities embedded in intellectual dependency.

A second motivation lies in rethinking the role of antitrust itself. Competition policy should not be viewed only as a corrective mechanism but as a redistributive policy, one that reallocates economic power and income flows away from concentrated incumbents. In the digital sphere, this redistributive function is even more critical, as dominant platforms extract rents from developers, businesses, and even states, leveraging them to expand control over infrastructural layers of the economy. By intervening in this cycle, antitrust helps to open space for new poles of innovation and industrial development.

This redistributive character also demands a broader normative reassessment of what antitrust seeks to achieve. Beyond efficiency or consumer welfare, competition enforcement must grapple with questions of fairness, industrial policy, and the need for deconcentration across multiple economic vectors. In digital markets, this means tackling not only platform behavior but also the structural conditions that enable monopolistic accumulation in data, infrastructure, and intellectual property.

A third dimension concerns the construction of digital sovereignty. Establishing specialized agencies and regulatory bureaucracies focused on digital issues enables the state to accumulate expertise and reduce informational asymmetries with powerful firms. While early interventions may be imperfect, over time such institutions gain the capacity to design remedies that cut through technical or market barriers erected by platforms. Mechanisms such as mandatory data-sharing, interoperability obligations, and structured consultation processes all emerge from this institutional learning.

Building such capacity also has a multilateral dimension. Digital markets are global, and the development of a shared regulatory grammar across jurisdictions is essential. Coordinated approaches not only strengthen the effectiveness of domestic interventions but also give regulators collective leverage in addressing global platforms’ conduct.

Finally, a fourth vector is that the creation of regulatory tools in Brazil holds significant geopolitical weight. As a regional leader and active participant in forums such as the BRICS, the G20, the OECD, and the International Competition Network (ICN), Brazil’s stance helps shape the possibilities for regulatory experimentation across the Global South. By asserting a clear regulatory posture, Brazil reinforces the idea of digital sovereignty as a strategic variable for developing economies seeking to avoid subordination in the global digital order.

Brazil leads towards the future

Seen from this perspective, the Digital Fair Competition Bill is more than a legal reform. It embodies the attempt to address structural concentrations of power through flexible but institutionally grounded mechanisms, while also signaling Brazil’s commitment to sovereignty, redistribution, and multilateral cooperation.

Brazil’s Digital Agenda, therefore, represents an important step forward. While much remains to be done, the agenda—and particularly the competition bill—offers a starting point for building the capacities, institutions, and international linkages needed to confront concentration in digital markets. It is not a final answer but a crucial beginning in constructing a more equitable digital future for Brazil and, by extension, other developing economies navigating similar challenges.