Brazilian Congress Passes Internet Rights Bill

Anthony Boadle BRASILIA (Reuters) – Brazil’s Senate unanimously approved landmark legislation on Tuesday that guarantees equal access to the internet and protects the privacy of Brazilian users in the face of revelations of U.S. spying. President Dilma Rousseff, who was the target of U.S. spying according to documents leaked by former NSA analyst Edward Snowden, plans to sign the bill into law. She will present it on Wednesday at a global conference on the future of the internet, her office said in a blog post. The legislation, dubbed Brazil’s “Internet Constitution,” has been praised by experts such as British physicist and World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee for balancing the rights and responsibilities of users, governments and corporations, while ensuring the internet remains an open and decentralized network. To ensure passage of the bill, Rousseff’s government had to withdraw a controversial provision that would have forced global internet companies to store data about their Brazilian users on data center servers in the country. The provision was added to the law after revelations last year that the U.S. National Security Agency had spied on the personal internet communications of Brazilians, including Rousseff and other world leaders. Instead, the law says companies like Google Inc and Facebook Inc will be subject to Brazilian laws and courts in cases involving information about Brazilians, even if the data is stored on servers abroad. The government has refused to roll back a net neutrality provision that has been fiercely opposed by telecommunications companies because it bars them from charging higher rates for access to content that uses more bandwidth, such as streaming video and voice services like Skype. The law protects freedom of expression and information by stipulating that service providers will not be liable for content posted by users but must comply with court orders to remove offensive or defamatory material. The law restricts the collection and use of metadata from internet users in Brazil. After Snowden’s spying revelations, including allegations that the NSA secretly collected data stored on servers by internet companies such as Google and Yahoo Inc, Brazil sought to force them to store the data on Brazilian servers in the country. Internet companies complained that this would raise their costs and create barriers to the free flow of information. The revelations of NSA spying using powerful surveillance programs have disrupted relations between the United States and Brazil and prompted Rousseff to cancel a state visit to Washington in October and condemn mass electronic surveillance of the Internet in a speech to the U.N. General Assembly. Rousseff and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, another leader who was allegedly spied on by the NSA, have led an international effort to curb digital espionage on the Internet. (Reporting by Anthony Boadle; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)