Brazil did not drop Bill 4.675/2025, but it narrowed the text and pushed back the Chamber of Deputies vote, leaving the biggest platforms in a better position than they were before. The Fair Competition in Digital Markets bill would still amend Law 12.529/2011 and give CADE, Brazil’s competition regulator, powers to act before platforms move, not just after the damage is done.
Who Gets Watched, Who Gets a Pass
The bill would let CADE designate certain platforms as being of systemic relevance in digital markets and then impose obligations on them in advance. Those obligations include limits on favouring their own services, duties to make systems work with rivals, transparency about how rankings and algorithms operate, and a requirement to notify acquisitions. That is the basic shape of the state’s answer to platform power: regulate the giants, but only after drawing a narrower circle around them.
The revenue thresholds stayed the same at about R$50 billion in global revenue or R$5 billion in Brazil. What changed is the test applied after that. The criteria must now be weighed together rather than counted separately, which narrows the field. The original text weighed data volume, number of business and end users, and gatekeeper characteristics separately. The new text requires them to be assessed jointly, making the label harder to attach. Fewer platforms will likely land inside the regulator’s sights. The rest keep operating under the old order.
What People Actually Did
The rapporteur, Deputy Aliel Machado, circulated the substitute text between late June and mid-July and framed it as adding legal certainty. CADE’s acting president, Diogo Thomson de Andrade, has said the regulator is open to changing wording that is not clear. The rapporteur’s office says a designation would now run for up to six years, down from ten in the original bill, and could be reopened after two years if the market changed significantly. That’s the language of managed restraint, not disruption. The machinery stays intact; the leash just gets adjusted.
The bill was aimed at the largest technology platforms and would have made Brazil one of the largest democracies outside the European Union to regulate them this way. The distinction, as described in the text, is between acting before and acting after. Competition law normally punishes abuse once it has happened and been proven, which can take years in digital markets. This bill would let the regulator set rules for the largest platforms up front, in a model similar to Europe’s Digital Markets Act. Even here, the state’s answer is still to manage monopoly power, not dismantle the system that breeds it.
Pressure From Above, Costs Below
The changes came amid outside pressure. The United States ran a trade investigation into Brazil under Section 301 that named Brazilian digital regulation, and closed it on 15 July with a 25% tariff on many Brazilian goods, effective 22 July. Twenty Republican members of Congress wrote to the US Trade Representative in late July citing this bill by number. Platform lobbying also ran alongside the pressure, as did opposition inside Congress, where the bill was already contested. The message from the powerful was plain enough: regulate too hard, and the punishment comes from abroad, from lobbyists, and from the same political class that keeps the whole arrangement moving.
The decrees published on 21 May 2026 on platform content moderation remain in force, and courts have declined to suspend them. They were not part of this revision. What has been deferred is the competition piece, the part that would change how the largest platforms are allowed to behave in the market rather than what they must remove from their services. The vote has not been scheduled. So the rules that shape speech stay in place, the market rules get narrowed, and the people at the bottom keep living under platforms and regulators alike.