Brazil's landmark effort to regulate the largest technology platforms has been significantly narrowed, making it harder for the government to designate companies as systemically important and impose rules on them before they cause market harm.
Bill 4.675/2025, known as the Fair Competition in Digital Markets bill, would have given Brazil's competition regulator, CADE, the power to act preemptively against dominant platforms—a model similar to Europe's Digital Markets Act. But the revised text, circulated by rapporteur Deputy Aliel Machado between late June and mid-July, tightens the criteria for which companies can be regulated this way.
The changes came as Brazil faced intense external pressure. The United States closed a Section 301 trade investigation into Brazilian digital regulation on 15 July, imposing a 25% tariff on many Brazilian goods effective 22 July. Twenty Republican members of Congress wrote to the US Trade Representative in late July, specifically citing this bill by number. Platform lobbying also mounted alongside the pressure, with opposition building inside Congress where the bill was already contested.
How the Bill Changed
The revenue thresholds remain the same: about R$50 billion in global revenue or R$5 billion in Brazil. What shifted is how regulators determine whether a platform meets those thresholds. The original text evaluated data volume, number of business and end users, and gatekeeper characteristics separately. The new version requires all these criteria to be weighed together, making it substantially harder for CADE to designate a company as systemically relevant.
Under the revised text, a designation would last up to six years instead of ten, and could be reopened after two years if the market changed significantly. CADE's acting president, Diogo Thomson de Andrade, has said the regulator is open to changing wording that isn't clear, suggesting flexibility in implementation.
What This Approach Means
The distinction matters enormously for how markets work. Traditional competition law waits for abuse to happen, then punishes it—a process that can take years in digital markets where dominance can entrench quickly. This bill would have let regulators set rules for the largest platforms upfront, requiring them to limit favoritism toward their own services, ensure interoperability with rivals, disclose how rankings and algorithms work, and notify CADE of acquisitions before they close.
Brazil would have become one of the largest democracies outside the European Union to regulate digital markets this way. The narrowed version still aims at the largest technology platforms, but raises the bar for intervention significantly.
Deputy Machado framed the changes as adding legal certainty, a common argument when regulations are weakened. The bill's vote hasn't been scheduled, leaving its fate uncertain as the Chamber of Deputies weighs competing pressures from the US government, platforms themselves, and domestic critics who argue that weak regulation leaves Brazilian businesses and consumers vulnerable to unfair market practices.
Separately, decrees published on 21 May this year on platform content moderation remain in force, and courts have declined to suspend them. Those rules address what platforms must remove from their services. What's been deferred is the competition piece—the part that would actually change how the largest platforms are allowed to behave in the market.
Why This Matters:
Brazil's retreat on tech regulation reveals how trade pressure and corporate lobbying can override democratic lawmaking. The narrowed bill makes it significantly harder for regulators to address market concentration before it causes harm—shifting the burden back onto competition authorities to prove abuse after it's already happened, a process that can take years. For Brazilian businesses locked out of digital markets by dominant platforms, and for consumers whose data and choices are shaped by algorithmic systems, weaker preemptive rules mean less protection. The timing is telling: the US tariff threat arrived just as the bill moved toward a vote, and the revised text emerged weeks later. This pattern matters for how democracies can regulate markets in the face of pressure from larger economies and the companies themselves.