On June 16, 2026, Brazil's National Telecommunications Agency (Anatel) extended the deadline for its Call for Contributions No. 1/2026 from June 25 to July 25, 2026. The consultation examines whether large digital platforms — Google, Netflix, Meta, TikTok, Amazon — should pay telecom operators for the network capacity their traffic consumes. Extending a deadline is a bureaucratic act. Its implications are not.
This is Anatel's third consultation on this topic since 2023. Each successive round has refined the regulatory record, and the agency's competition superintendency is simultaneously requesting detailed traffic data directly from companies in the sector. Anatel is not merely gathering views. It is assembling a case.
What the Consultation Actually Covers
Anatel's March 27, 2026 press release frames Call for Contributions No. 1/2026 as a dual inquiry: how do large OTT platforms affect telecom infrastructure investment and quality of experience, and how should Value-Added Services be marketed and billed to consumers? The 18-question questionnaire spans data traffic volumes, Quality of Experience metrics, pricing transparency, consumer consent mechanisms, and manipulative design practices ('dark patterns') in subscription flows.
The consumer protection half is the less controversial component, and it is genuine — dark patterns that obstruct plan cancellation and opaque bundle billing harm users and fall clearly within Anatel's mandate. But the infrastructure-impact half is where the fair-share fee logic lives, and that is what makes this consultation consequential far beyond its immediate scope. Brazil's 185 million internet users represent 86.9 percent internet penetration as of late 2025, making it one of the world's largest markets in which this regulatory tension is playing out.
Steelmanning the Telcos
The telecom operators' core argument is not frivolous. Carriers invest real capital in 4G and 5G rollout, fiber deployment, and backbone capacity. In markets where retail broadband prices are compressed by competition and mobile data bundles are cheap, operators argue they bear the infrastructure burden of traffic growth while platforms capture the economic value. It is not obviously irrational to ask whether companies generating the most traffic should contribute directly to network costs rather than exclusively through end-user subscriptions.
That argument, however, collapses when tested against actual data.
What the European Evidence Shows
Europe ran this experiment. The Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC) concluded in its assessment that there was 'no evidence' fair-share fees were justified, warning they would 'abolish key net neutrality guarantees' and give dominant ISPs a mechanism to exploit last-mile bottlenecks. Data from Analysys Mason, cited in European Commission stakeholder responses, showed that network-related ISP costs across Europe grew by just 3 percent between 2018 and 2021, while total network traffic grew by over 160 percent over the same period. Technology efficiency gains absorbed the load; the investment crisis the telecom sector described was not visible in actual cost structures.
The European Commission eventually reached the same conclusion. In July 2025, Commission spokesman Thomas Regnier stated that 'imposing a network fee is not a viable solution,' based on findings from its February 2024 White Paper. Only incumbent telecom operators and their affiliates supported the fees in public consultation; civil society, regulators, academics, and smaller platforms were united in opposition.
The Legal Collision With Marco Civil
Brazil already has an answer written into statute. Article 9 of the Marco Civil da Internet (Law No. 12.965/2014) mandates that all data packets receive equal treatment 'regardless of content, origin and destination, service, terminal or application.' Presidential Decree 8.771/2016, which implements the Marco Civil's neutrality provisions, explicitly prohibits ISPs from prioritizing traffic based on 'commercial arrangements' or preferencing their own services. Only two narrow exceptions exist: emergency services and technical management indispensable to network stability.
Fair-share fees are structurally incompatible with this framework. A payment mechanism that conditions platform traffic treatment on whether it pays the ISP creates exactly the commercial prioritization Decree 8.771 prohibits. The ISP may claim it is not technically degrading non-paying traffic — but when paying platforms receive guaranteed capacity and non-paying ones do not, the practical effect is the same as degradation. European regulators recognized this logic and rejected the fees explicitly on neutrality grounds.
Anatel cannot resolve this tension through a Regulation on User Duties alone. That instrument cannot amend the Marco Civil, which is an Act of Congress. Any fair-share fee regime would require either a congressional amendment of Law 12.965/2014 or a legal theory about payment obligations that somehow does not constitute a commercial traffic arrangement — a theory BEREC found unconvincing and that Brazil's courts would likely scrutinize closely.
What Proportionate Regulation Looks Like
There is a legitimate regulation Anatel can issue without dismantling the net neutrality framework. The consumer protection elements of Call for Contributions No. 1/2026 — dark pattern prohibitions, transparent VAS billing, clear cancellation mechanisms, standardized consent flows — address real harms and rest on firm legal authority.
On infrastructure investment, proportionate options exist that do not require platform payments: strengthened wholesale access obligations that promote competition rather than ISP consolidation, improved spectrum policy, and mandatory network performance transparency that gives market forces and regulators alike the data needed to identify genuine bottlenecks.
Brazil's internet governance body, CGI.br, has long maintained that the open internet is foundational to the country's digital economy. With 150 million YouTube users and 131 million TikTok users, Brazil's digital economy runs on the platforms whose traffic the fair-share debate targets. Fees that raise platform costs cascade into higher prices for Brazilian consumers, reduced investment in Portuguese-language content, and a regulatory precedent that creates a two-tier internet — exactly the outcome Marco Civil was designed to prevent.
July 25 and What Comes After
The July 25 deadline will produce submissions, not a regulation. Anatel's path from data collection to rulemaking is long, and the agency could still limit its output to the consumer protection elements of the consultation. But three rounds in three years, with an extended deadline and parallel data requests from the competition superintendency, signal an agency that has already decided to move.
If Anatel does proceed toward fair-share fees, it faces a binary choice: contradict Brazil's foundational internet rights law, or produce a regulation so narrow it gives the telecom sector nothing it actually wants. Europe spent years arriving at the second option. Brazil should read the evidence and skip the detour.