Brazil’s Fast-Track Digital Markets Bill Risks Harming Competition and Consumers, ICLE Scholar Warns
BRASÍLIA (19 Mar 2026) — As Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies fast-tracks a new digital-markets framework, International Center for Law and Economics (ICLE) Senior Competition Scholar Dario Oliveira Neto says bypassing the normal legislative process risks harming the competition and innovation the bill seeks to promote.
Oliveira Neto urged lawmakers to allow consultation with civil society, industry, and other stakeholders, instead of legislating under artificial urgency. A transparent process, he said, would better protect Brazilian consumers.
Bill 4675/2025 raises issues that warrant careful review and a formal regulatory impact assessment, as contemplated by Brazilian law and regulatory best practice, he added. The requested “urgent procedure” (regime de urgência) could weaken the final legislation and limit public feedback, increasing the chance the rules miss real-world economic effects.
“The urgency motion for Bill No. 4675/2025 threatens to fast-track a proposal that lacks meaningful congressional debate and fails to account for the shortcomings of similar global regulations like the EU’s DMA,” Oliveira Neto said. “By proposing ten-year gatekeeper designations and a redundant ‘Digital Markets Superintendency,’ the bill risks creating institutional conflict and a regulatory framework misaligned with the rapid pace of digital innovation. Rushing such a consequential initiative without broad stakeholder engagement or an efficiency-defense provision is unwise, as legislative speed must not come at the expense of regulatory quality.”
While more flexible on paper than the European Union’s Digital Markets Act that inspired it, the bill would give the Administrative Council for Economic Defense (CADE) wide discretion to impose behavioral and structural remedies. Oliveira Neto noted that those powers could inadvertently block pro-competitive conduct. The proposal also omits an “efficiency defense” that would allow digital-service providers to show their conduct benefits competition overall.
Oliveira Neto said the measure shifts policy away from the consumer-welfare standard toward a “fairness”-based approach that risks protecting less efficient rivals at users’ expense and could trigger geopolitical tensions.
He said the mandates could also create unintended harms:
- Limits on “self-preferencing” could prevent integrated features, forcing users through extra steps to complete routine tasks and raising monetary and non-monetary costs.
- Mandatory data sharing with third parties could introduce vulnerabilities and weaken trusted “walled-garden” systems.
- A proposed Digital Markets Superintendency within CADE could overlap with the existing General Superintendency, leading to conflicting rulings, higher compliance costs, legal uncertainty, and instability in Brazil’s digital economy.
To request an interview with Dario, contact Jim Fellinger at [email protected].
About ICLE
The International Center for Law & Economics is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research center working with a roster of more than one hundred academic affiliates and research centers from around the globe. ICLE scholars promote the use of law and economics methodologies to inform public policy debates.