Brazil’s Google News Case and the Art of Not Letting Go
Some legal cases age like wine. Others age like browser tabs left open too long.
Brazil’s Google News inquiry belongs firmly in the latter category. On April 3, Brazil’s Administrative Council for Economic Defense (CADE) announced that its Tribunal had unanimously decided to send a seven-year-old administrative inquiry concerning Google’s use of journalistic content—whether for indexing information, displaying “snippets,” or, more recently, generating “AI Overviews”—back to the agency’s General Superintendence (SG/CADE). This time, the Tribunal instructed SG/CADE to open a formal administrative proceeding and conduct a deeper investigation.
The shift followed the vote of acting President Diogo Thomson de Andrade (the “Thomson vote”) and a concurring opinion (voto-vista) by Commissioner Camila Cabral Pires-Alves (the “Pires-Alves vote”). The rapporteur, former Commissioner Gustavo Augusto Freitas de Lima, had originally voted to dismiss the matter, but later amended his vote to join the concurring opinion.
A unanimous vote may sound decisive. In this case, it is almost the opposite. Rather than close a stale inquiry launched in 2019, whose original factual premises have changed beyond recognition, CADE chose to keep the matter alive while substituting a new theory of harm and, in some respects, a new set of facts. There are several reasons to view that move with concern and skepticism.