Brazil’s Gatekeeper Bill Gets a Tuneup, Not a Rethink
Brazil may soon become the first country in the Americas to regulate digital platforms before they do anything wrong. Bill 4,675/2025 would let the Administrative Council for Economic Defense (CADE) designate large technology companies as having “systemic relevance” and impose special obligations without first proving anticompetitive conduct or consumer harm.
That is a substantial change in how competition law works. The bill would allow CADE to regulate self-preferencing, default settings, interoperability, and data use in advance rather than through ordinary case-by-case enforcement.
By the government’s estimate, five to 10 companies would be designated, most of them likely American. The stakes therefore extend beyond competition policy. Foreign regulation of U.S. technology firms has become a trade and foreign-policy flashpoint, and Brazil’s proposal could add another point of friction.
The bill also tests a broader claim now shaping digital regulation around the world. Can traditional antitrust enforcement police dominant platforms, or should governments supplement it with pre-emptive rules modeled on the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA)?
Brazil offers a revealing test. Its competition authority has recently shown what existing law can accomplish. Settlements with Apple and Google produced DMA-style outcomes, including greater openness in Apple’s iOS operating system, through ordinary case-by-case enforcement. Early evidence from Europe, meanwhile, increasingly points to consumer harm and weaker incentives to innovate rather than the promised surge in competition.
Brazil’s choice could influence other emerging economies weighing similar regimes. That gives the debate in Brasília significance well beyond Brazil.
In “Digital Overreach: A Premature Turn to Ex Ante Regulation in Brazil,” Geoffrey Manne, Dirk Auer, and I argued that Brazil neither needs nor would benefit from a new ex ante regime for digital markets. The narrower question here is whether the substitute text now before the Chamber of Deputies improves on the government’s original proposal and how seriously it addresses the criticisms advanced by the International Center for Law & Economics (ICLE) and others.
The substitute adopts many of the procedural and institutional safeguards we recommended. It leaves the proposal’s doctrinal core intact. That core remains the strongest argument against enacting the bill.