Brazil approves new internet legislation

Brazilian senators vote on Internet Law

The Brazilian Senate has just approved the Civil Landmark of the Internet (Marco Civil da Internet), a subject that will for sure be on the cover of this wednesday Brazilian newspapers. The text of the law ensures net neutrality, even though it also opens the door for content discrimination in specific cases to be determined by presidential decree. The net neutrality -- the legal prohibition of discriminate data flow according to the type of content, such as slowing down Skype connections on mobile internet -- was the most sensitive subject of the law, a subject that now will be probably on the hands of the next Brazilian president to resolve.

The law also ensures the privacy of users and limits the liability of Internet Services Providers in cases of judicial process regarding third party's prejudicial content published online. There is an interesting mention that internet application providers (such as Facebook or Google) should not abuse in the use of private information of users (even if authorized by them). I would not be surprised to see in the future a civil lawsuit against one of the big internet companies in the country.

I'm curious to see how will be the coverage of the main newspapers tomorrow. The first time the text was approved on the Chamber of Deputies I noticed few of the criticism about the limited net neutrality (this I saw later on specialized publications). In fact, both O Globo and Folha were rather optimistic about it. In fact just now (as the subject is only on the online versions of the media, the attentions are focused to the victory of the government in surpassing the opposition maneuvers against the project.

-- update --

I just had a brief discussion with a friend  which was on the government during the public consultations of the internet law project. Basically the reason why they let the details of net neutrality to be determined by presidential decree was in order not to pass a rigid law that would have to be changed in the future due to technological developments. So net neutrality is still there as a principle and a set of rules which will have specific subsets of parameters and exceptions (Many thanks to Guilherme Almeida de Almeida).

As for the media coverage it was pretty modest, compared to the first approval. Since the text was not passed with many changes, newspapers sticked to describing the law and its concepts. Folha published an article from PSDB (opposition) senator Aloysio Nunes Ferreira arguing the law could be improved had the Senate more time to work on it. He said the privacy issue could be better defined, granting more protection to users.

-- end of update --

Catching-up

The Easter week I skipped publishing here was dominated by the Petrobras scandal (the refinery purchase that brought a billionaire loss to the company) and the presidential election forecasts, that again are dimming for Dilma. They both seem to be related, but in fact I hardly believe the average voter will put much weight on what is being done with the biggest company in the country.

On the Petrobras' front the most interesting development is a sort of discrepancy between the declarations of José Sérgio Gabrielli, Petrobras' former CEO and president Dilma Rousseff. Dilma said the Pasadena purchase was a bad business. This Sunday, in an interview to O Estado de S. Paulo, Gabrielli replied saying that Dilma was one of the board members and shared the same responsibility in the purchase. This was at least what O Estado de S. Paulo put in the headlines. I read the whole interview and could see Gabrielli saying the purchase was totally in acceptance with the 2006's context. But the contradiction surely was enough to be replicated by Folha de S. Paulo and O Globo on their monday editions.