Brazil’s Election Puts US Big Tech Under Pressure as ‘Digital Sovereignty’ Becomes Key Policy Fight

The race for Brazil’s presidency is shaping up to be a critical inflection point for the world’s major technology companies, as all leading candidates embrace the idea of “digital sovereignty,” signaling an end to the light-touch regulatory environment that foreign Big Tech firms have long enjoyed in Latin America’s largest economy. The highest-profile move in this direction is a proposal now before the Brazilian Congress—Bill 4675/2025, known as the Fair Competition Act for Digital Markets—that would grant Brazil’s antitrust authority unprecedented powers to proactively regulate the largest digital platforms.

The bill would amend existing competition law to empower the Administrative Council for Economic Defense, or CADE (the Portuguese acronym for Brazil's antitrust authority), to designate firms of "systemic relevance" in the country’s digital markets and impose specific ex ante obligations on them before any anticompetitive conduct is proven. This approach, inspired by the European Union’s Digital Markets Act but tailored for Brazil, would allow CADE to mandate actions like greater data portability, non-discriminatory access for rivals, and limits on self-preferencing within their own ecosystems—rules aimed squarely at the handful of US-based platforms like Google and Meta that dominate the Brazilian market. Experts estimate that the framework would apply to between five and ten companies in its initial years, fundamentally altering the operating landscape for Big Tech in a nation of over 214 million people.

The push for a new regulatory framework is a core tenet of incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s platform, which frames "digital sovereignty" as a central axis of his policy. His plan includes a focus on the "democratic regulation of digital platforms and AI," which builds on measures his administration has already taken, such as signing decrees to increase the liability of platforms for illegal content shared by their users. Lula has also advocated on the global stage, using the United Nations General Assembly to call for stronger multilateral rules to govern technology, arguing that a handful of “techno-oligarchs” must not be allowed to operate without ethical or legal constraints.

However, the political consensus around the term “sovereignty” masks widely diverging approaches. Flávio Bolsonaro, the leading opposition candidate and son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, also invokes the concept but advocates for a much “lighter-touch, pro-innovation” regulatory stance that would likely roll back some platform accountability measures. This polarization means the outcome of the election will directly determine the speed and severity of the new regulatory regime. Should Lula secure a new term, the pressure for Bill 4675/2025 to move forward in Congress will increase, while a Bolsonaro win would likely lead to the bill being stalled or significantly watered down.

The fate of Bill 4675/2025, which has already been granted a request for urgent consideration by the Chamber of Deputies, hangs on the political timetable of the ongoing election. Lawmakers must decide whether to bypass standing committees and send the proposal directly to a plenary vote, a move that would fast-track one of the most consequential policy decisions for the digital economy in Brazil’s recent history.

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What it touches

The proposed regulatory changes directly threaten the business models of large, publicly traded US technology platforms like Meta (META), Alphabet (GOOGL), and Apple (AAPL) by allowing the Brazilian government to impose ex ante conditions on how they operate their dominant digital ecosystems, including search, social media, operating systems, and app stores.