The European Union (EU) and other nations have laws aimed at promoting competition among tech companies. The European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) has been a model for other nations, including Brazil, where the government is seeking to pass similar legislation. The European Commission says the DMA regulates the largest social media companies, such as X and Facebook, to prevent them from abusing their monopoly positions and to create a level playing field for smaller businesses and greater choice for users.
But free speech advocates in the US and Brazil believe that such legislation is a strategy to expand censorship. “This bill represents yet another attempt by the Lula administration to control public debate in Brazil,” said Brazilian Congressman Marcel Van Hattam. “Under the pretext of ‘digital market regulation,’ the government is creating a pressure tool over major platforms, effectively giving the state a blank check to impose unnecessary, arbitrary, and company-specific rules under the threat of heavy penalties.”
Brazil’s Ministry of Finance, which is advocating for the legislation, denies that its goal is censorship. The proposed legislation “deals exclusively with economic and competition aspects associated with large technology companies,” it said in a statement to Public, “without distinction of their origin, and does not include rules regarding content distributed by big tech companies.”
But Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), the Chairman of the powerful House Judiciary Committee, recently joined Van Hattam in raising the alarm about the apparent effort by Europe, Brazil and other nations to force US tech companies to engage in more censorship of speech that is legally protected in the US.
“Six of the seven businesses that the Commission has designated as gatekeepers are American companies or wholly owned subsidiaries of American companies,” wrote Jordan late last month in a letter to Brazil’s Finance Ministry’s Secretariat for Economic Reforms, Alexandre Rebêlo Ferreira. “Companies that CADE [the regulatory agency] deems noncompliant are subject to fines of up to 20 percent of their gross revenue in the ‘affected line of business.’”
