A Regulatory Vacuum Anatel Wants to Close
On May 26, 2026, Brazil's telecom regulator Anatel opened a 45-day tomada de subsídios — an initial public-input phase — on the country's first dedicated regulatory framework for submarine cables. The window was originally due to close July 10, but it is still open: after Vivo, Telxius and the Movimento Brasil Competitivo asked for 45 more days, Anatel partially granted the request, pushing the deadline to July 31, 2026 (TELETIME).
The proposal came from councilor Alexandre Freire, president of Anatel's Telecommunications Infrastructure Committee, and was approved unanimously by the agency's board. Freire has been blunt about the stakes: without its own policies for cable and data-center governance, he has warned, Brazil risks becoming a "colônia digital" — a digital colony (ConvergenciaDigital).
That language is dramatic for a regulatory proceeding. But the underlying diagnosis isn't wrong. Submarine cables were never written into Brazilian telecom law as "infrastructure" in the formal sense — they sat, for regulatory purposes, closer to generic international links. Freire points to a concrete illustration: construction of a desalination plant near Fortaleza's cable-landing hub at Praia do Futuro created a standoff with cable operators that Anatel had no clear authority to resolve. "We had no rules to act and it was confusing," he said (ConvergenciaDigital).
The Concentration Problem Is Real
The numbers back up the concern. Roughly 99% of Brazil's international data traffic — everything from banking transactions to cloud workloads to government services — travels over submarine cables (Abranet). That traffic is not evenly distributed: an estimated 90% of it funnels through landing stations concentrated in a single state, Ceará, whose capital Fortaleza has become one of the most cable-dense landing hubs on Earth (Click Petróleo e Gás). A cut, a natural disaster, or deliberate sabotage at that single hub wouldn't just slow Brazil's internet — it could disrupt banking and government operations nationwide.
This isn't a uniquely Brazilian anxiety. The U.S. FCC opened its own 2026 proceeding to modernize submarine cable landing-license rules and accelerate deployment while screening for national-security risk (FCC), and European regulators have pushed comparable resilience mandates since the Baltic Sea cable-severing incidents. Brazil tightening its own rules on landing-point diversification, incident reporting, and physical and cyber protection of cable infrastructure is a proportionate response to a genuine single-point-of-failure risk — not overreach. Anatel also deserves credit for running this as an open input phase rather than a fait accompli: the consultation's seven thematic axes — regulatory framework, institutional governance, operations, security and resilience, ecosystem incentives, monitoring, and international cooperation — read as a fairly neutral technical scoping exercise, not a pre-written mandate (TELETIME).
Where "Sovereignty" Framing Risks Getting Ahead of the Policy
The trouble is the rhetoric outrunning the instrument. "Digital colony" is sovereignty language, and sovereignty language has a track record of drifting from resilience regulation — redundancy, incident reporting, diversified landing points — toward something closer to data localization or foreign-ownership screening, which raises the cost of building infrastructure in Brazil without doing much to fix the concentration problem itself. Brazil has already lived through a version of this with data centers: Anatel issued a stopgap resolution in the absence of legislation, while the Redata tax-incentive bill and a broader data-center sovereignty package move separately through Congress (TELETIME). Layering a third, cable-specific sovereignty track on top risks the same fragmentation.
More concretely, Anatel's consultation isn't happening in a vacuum. Brazil's Ministry of Communications already ran its own 2025 public consultation on a national submarine cable policy, aimed at expanding landing points through new "Zonas de Interesse de Ancoragem" (anchoring interest zones) and simplifying licensing through a single service window (Participa + Brasil). That is precisely the right tool for the concentration problem Freire describes: incentives and streamlined permitting for operators to land cables in Salvador, Rio Grande do Norte, or elsewhere besides Ceará. If Anatel's parallel framework adds a second, security-flavored layer of approvals on top of that expansion push, the practical effect could be more paperwork for the same operators the ministry is trying to attract — a self-defeating outcome if the actual goal is reducing dependence on one landing hub.
The Right Fix Is Diversification, Not Gatekeeping
Brazil's cable-landing concentration is a solvable infrastructure problem, best solved by making it cheaper and faster to build landing stations in more places — which is what the ministry's ZIA incentives are for — paired with baseline resilience and incident-reporting rules, which is what Anatel's consultation should produce. What the framework should not become is a discretionary sovereignty gate letting regulators second-guess cable ownership or routing on national-security grounds untethered from the concentration risk itself. Anatel's board should use the remaining days of this consultation to coordinate explicitly with the ministry's parallel process and pin Freire's stated goals — geographic diversification, incident monitoring, cyber protection — down as the rule's actual scope, rather than let "digital colony" rhetoric expand its ambition later.
The fix for a single point of failure is more points, not more permission slips.