Brazil's Chamber of Deputies is advancing PL 2768/2022, a sweeping digital competition bill that would empower the Administrative Council for Economic Defense (CADE) to designate dominant platforms as 'controladores de acessos essenciais' — essential access controllers — and impose ex-ante obligations on app stores, search engines, marketplaces, and operating systems. The Ministry of Finance's Secretariat for Economic Reforms (SEAE) and CADE have both published technical studies supporting the framework, lending the bill an unusually broad institutional consensus in Brasília.
That consensus deserves scrutiny. The European Union's Digital Markets Act, the explicit template for PL 2768/2022, has been in force since 2023. The early evidence is mixed at best: extensive compliance theater, ongoing investigations against every major designated gatekeeper, and a growing pile of complaints from European developers and consumers that the promised innovation dividend has not materialized. Brazil should be cautious about importing a regulatory architecture whose results are still being litigated in Luxembourg.
What PL 2768/2022 Actually Does
The bill, originally introduced by Deputy João Maia and substantially redrafted in committee, would create a new chapter within Brazil's competition framework. Its core mechanics will be familiar to anyone who has read Regulation (EU) 2022/1925:
- Designation by thresholds. Firms meeting size, user-base, and gatekeeping criteria would be designated as essential access controllers — Brazil's analogue to the EU's 'gatekeepers'.
- Ex-ante obligations. Designated firms would face pre-defined duties: interoperability, data portability, restrictions on self-preferencing, and limits on combining personal data across services.
- CADE as enforcer. Unlike the EU model, which centralizes enforcement in the European Commission, PL 2768/2022 vests authority in CADE — a respected but resource-constrained agency that already handles merger review, cartel prosecution, and conduct cases for an economy of 215 million people.
SEAE's supporting study and CADE's Departamento de Estudos Econômicos have both argued that the dynamics of digital markets — network effects, data advantages, multi-sided platforms — justify moving beyond Brazil's existing ex-post Lei de Defesa da Concorrência (Law 12,529/2011). That diagnosis is not wrong. The prescription is the harder question.
The EU's Cautionary Tale
Brussels promised that the DMA would unlock contestability. Eighteen months in, the picture is more complicated. Apple's compliance changes to its App Store in the EU have been characterized by the Commission itself as inadequate, triggering formal non-compliance proceedings. Google has faced repeated investigations over its search and Android implementations. Meta's 'pay or consent' model has been ruled non-compliant. Every major designated gatekeeper is in some form of regulatory conflict — which suggests either widespread bad faith, or, more plausibly, that the obligations are written at a level of abstraction that makes good-faith compliance genuinely difficult.
The costs are concrete. European developers have reported reduced feature parity with US and Asian versions of major platforms. Some services have been delayed or withheld from the EU market entirely. And the small and medium-sized businesses that the DMA was meant to empower have, in many cases, found their existing distribution arrangements destabilized without clear replacements.
Why Brazil's Context Argues for Restraint
Brazil is not the European Union. Three differences matter:
Market scale. The EU's single market gives Brussels leverage to demand product changes from global platforms. Brazil, despite its size, has historically been a price-taker in platform design. Imposing bespoke ex-ante rules risks Brazilian users receiving degraded or delayed versions of services — a phenomenon already visible in some EU rollouts.
Enforcement capacity. The European Commission's DG COMP has hundreds of staff dedicated to digital markets enforcement. CADE's Superintendência-Geral, by contrast, is already stretched across the full competition docket. Adding a complex, technically demanding ex-ante regime without commensurate resources is a recipe for inconsistent enforcement and litigation gridlock.
Existing tools. Brazil's competition law already permits CADE to investigate abuse of dominance, including in digital markets — and CADE has done so, including in its ongoing matters involving Google and Apple's app store practices. These cases are slow, but they produce evidence-based, fact-specific remedies rather than blanket prohibitions.
A Proportionate Path Forward
None of this is an argument for inaction. Brazilian consumers and developers deserve competitive digital markets, and CADE's studies have identified real concerns worth addressing. But the bill as drafted would be stronger if it:
- Started with sector-specific inquiries — formal market studies producing tailored remedies — rather than horizontal ex-ante prohibitions.
- Built in sunset and review clauses requiring CADE to demonstrate, with evidence, that designations and obligations have improved outcomes.
- Funded CADE properly before expanding its mandate, including dedicated technical staff with engineering and data-science expertise.
- Preserved Brazil's reputation as a market open to foreign investment by avoiding extraterritorial overreach and aligning, where sensible, with established competition principles.
The Chamber of Deputies has an opportunity to pass a digital competition law that is genuinely Brazilian — informed by CADE's caseload, calibrated to local market realities, and grounded in the country's strong administrative-law tradition. Copying Brussels is the path of least resistance. It is not the path most likely to produce competitive digital markets in Brazil.