Brazil Enacts Child Online Safety Law and Sends Big Tech Competition Bill to Congress

Overview

• President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva sanctioned the ECA Digital with vetoes and issued a measure to cut the adaptation period to six months, alongside another to convert the ANPD into an autonomous agency.
• The new law requires age verification, robust parental controls, and swift removal and reporting of abusive content, with penalties that include fines of up to R$50 million per infraction and possible suspension of services.
• The Presidency shelved its separate content-regulation proposal for social networks and opted to advance only the economic regulation of large platforms.
• The competition bill empowers CADE, creates a Superintendência de Mercados Digitais, applies revenue and qualitative thresholds (about R$5 billion in Brazil and US$50 billion globally), and contemplates remedies such as interoperability, data portability, and ranking transparency while banning exclusionary conduct like self‑preferencing, exclusivity and killer acquisitions.
• Congress accelerated the child-safety measure after the Felca video and approved it with broad cross-party support, and both the provisional measures and the new economic bill still require congressional review and further rule-making.