What the Court actually ordered
On 28 September 2026, Supreme Federal Court (STF) Minister Cristiano Zanin partially granted an injunction in ADPF 1.355, brought by the Partido Verde and the teachers' confederation CNTE. It orders Anatel to ensure that prepaid mobile users whose data allowance is exhausted can still reach official Electoral Justice services without being charged and without drawing down any allowance. The window runs from 72 hours before to 24 hours after each voting round. Press coverage and the STF's case page put those windows at 1–5 October and 22–26 October, matching the 4 and 25 October voting dates (STF news item; MobileTime).
Covered services are the .jus.br domains of the Electoral Justice, official apps such as e-Título and the results app, the polling-place lookup, electoral justification, results and ballot-box bulletins, and the TSE's "Fato ou Boato" fact-checking page. The TSE has 24 hours to send Anatel a list of any further addresses it deems essential, and Anatel must forward that list to operators (Teletime).
The strongest case for going further
The petitioners' argument deserves a fair statement. Brazil's prepaid mobile users are disproportionately lower-income, and many depend on a phone as their only connection. Voting day is when a voter must find a polling place, pull up a digital voter ID or justify an absence. A voter who has run out of data may be unable to do any of that. The petitioners asked for something broader: lifting the post-allowance block entirely, or guaranteeing a minimum speed. Amici argued that Anatel offered no technical simulations and that operators already keep zero-rating deals for Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, which makes the congestion warning look selective (MobileTime).
That is a serious point about regulatory consistency. It is a weaker point about network engineering.
Why the narrow order is the better design
Zanin refused the broad relief. According to the decision as reported, he denied the request to lift the general block after allowances run out, the request for reduced-speed browsing, and the request to bar operators from changing plan offers during the windows. His stated reason was that a general release "requires technical assessment" and could overload networks and disrupt essential communications (Atlas Público, citing the DJe of 28 September).
This is the proportionate answer. Anatel and the operators' association Conexis warned of network "collapse" if allowances were lifted broadly, and Anatel also stressed that mobile service runs in a private regime on finite spectrum (MobileTime; Teletime). Those warnings are plausible for open-ended access, where a user can stream video. They fit poorly with a closed list of government text-and-form services. Traffic to a polling-place lookup is tiny next to a video stream. A whitelist of known domains is also something operators can implement, because zero-rating of named destinations is a standard billing function.
The design has three other virtues:
- It is bounded in time. It lasts roughly four days per round, so any harm from a bad technical assumption is limited and reversible.
- It is bounded in content. It covers official civic infrastructure. It is not a general subsidy and it is not a precedent for free access to any site a political actor prefers.
- It is accountable. Anatel must file a detailed compliance report within five days after each window and tell the rapporteur promptly of any relevant problem (Atlas Público).
The net neutrality objection
Zero-rating is controversial in Brazil because the Marco Civil da Internet (Law 12.965/2014) treats network neutrality as a core principle, and open-internet advocates are right to be wary of any carve-out that lets intermediaries or courts pick winners. The order's design answers that worry for now. It benefits no commercial content provider, it is mandated by a court rather than negotiated for advantage, and it applies only to a public-service function. The risk is precedent. If the list of "essential" addresses grows by administrative accretion, the exception will start to look like discretionary traffic management.
The part that most needs attention is the fact-checking element. Gilmar Mendes's suggestion, accepted by Zanin, extends coverage to the sites of the TSE's partner fact-checkers, which include AFP, Agência Lupa, Aos Fatos and UOL Confere (Teletime). A pro-speech reader should be uneasy about any state body maintaining a list of favoured information sources, even good ones. The safeguard is transparency: the TSE's list should be published in full and kept under review, and the Court should reject any request to extend it to contested political content.
What to watch now
Eight justices followed the rapporteur in the virtual plenary that ended on 30 September, and Cármen Lúcia did not vote (Teletime). The first window has closed, and Anatel's first compliance report was due within five days of it. I could not find that report published, so the first-round evidence on congestion is not yet public. The second round, with its window of 22–26 October, will be the real test.
Three questions should shape the evaluation. First, did measured traffic on operator networks near polling places actually spike, as Anatel predicted, or stay negligible? Second, did prepaid users with exhausted allowances actually reach e-Título and the results pages? Third, was the TSE's supplementary list kept minimal and public? If the answers are no spike, yes access and yes transparency, the order becomes a template for election-day inclusion. A Brazilian regulator could then extend it by rule and spare itself the next urgent lawsuit. If the networks held, Anatel should accept that its collapse warning was aimed at a different, broader order than the one the Court actually issued.