The ruling that nobody in Brussels expected to matter this much
On 26 June 2025, Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court (STF) concluded a judgment that had been working its way through the docket for years. By a majority vote that crossed ideological lines, the Court declared Article 19 of the Marco Civil da Internet — Law 12.965/2014, Brazil’s Internet Bill of Rights — partially unconstitutional. The substance of the ruling was technical: platforms could no longer claim civil liability immunity for third-party content simply by waiting for a specific court order. They now had affirmative duties of governance, transparency, and procedural diligence that mirrored, with notable precision, the obligations imposed on Very Large Online Platforms by the European Union’s Digital Services Act.
In Brussels, that summer, the ruling registered as one more data point in a broader convergence narrative. The European AI Office was busy with the Code of Practice for general-purpose AI. The Commission was preparing its first comprehensive review of DSA enforcement. The Brazilian decision was filed, by most policy staff in the relevant cabinets, under “Brussels Effect, expected outcome”.
Eight months later, that filing is being reopened. The reason is not that Brasília has suddenly become a regulatory authority Brussels wants to copy. The reason is the opposite: Brazil has become the only large jurisdiction outside the EU where a DSA-style regime of platform liability is being implemented in real time, by a constitutional court rather than an administrative agency, on a population of 215 million and a media ecosystem dominated by exactly the platforms the DSA is trying to discipline. Whatever happens in Brazil in the next eighteen months will produce evidence — empirical, observable, contestable — about what the DSA itself will look like once the first VLOP investigations conclude and the second-generation reforms begin.
This is what changed. Not who copies whom. What the empirical record now contains.
What Article 19 used to do, and what the STF said it cannot do anymore
For over a decade, Article 19 of the Marco Civil shielded platforms from civil liability for third-party content unless they failed to remove that content after a specific court order. The architecture was deliberate. The drafters of the Marco Civil, working through the Center for Technology and Society at the Getúlio Vargas Foundation between 2009 and 2014, had built it as a defense against what they saw as the central risk of platform regulation: private censorship driven by liability fear. If platforms could be sued for any user content, they would over-remove. The Article 19 regime placed the burden of identifying illegal content on courts, not on platforms, and accepted the trade-off that some illegal content would remain online longer than it would in a more aggressive regime.
The STF found that the trade-off no longer balanced. A purely reactive regime, the Court held, failed to provide adequate protection for fundamental rights — human dignity, privacy, the integrity of democratic processes — when those rights are systemically threatened by content that the platform itself can identify with reasonable diligence. The ruling preserved the constitutional principle that intermediaries cannot be required to monitor all user content in advance. What it added was a duty of diligence that activates when the platform has knowledge, or could be expected to have knowledge, of illegal content.
The ruling also introduced procedural and governance obligations that read like a translation of DSA Articles 14 through 27. Platforms must publish annual transparency reports. They must maintain accessible customer service channels. They must establish self-regulation with explicit moderation rules. They must designate a legal representative in Brazil. Marketplaces face strict liability under the Consumer Defense Code. Email providers, private messaging services, and video-conference platforms retain the Article 19 protection because of constitutional secrecy of communications under Article 5(XII).
The structural effect is that Brazil now operates, as of late June 2025, under a hybrid regime: constitutional protections preserved for communications under judicial secrecy, DSA-style affirmative duties imposed on public-facing platforms. The mechanism is not statutory — Congress has not amended the Marco Civil. The mechanism is constitutional interpretation by the apex court, which means it applies immediately and binds all federal and state courts in Brazil from the day the ruling is published in the Diário Oficial.
This last point matters more than any analyst outside Brazil has fully digested. The DSA took five years to design, two years of trilogues to enact, and required Member State implementation through 2024. The Brazilian regime came into force on the morning the STF published its decision.
What Brussels is actually reading
The first DSA review, formally scheduled in Article 91 of Regulation 2022/2065, is being prepared through 2026 with public consultation closing in the second half of the year. The European Commission’s DG CONNECT has been collecting input from civil society, platforms, Member States, academics, and — increasingly — from non-EU regulators implementing comparable regimes.
The submissions from Brazilian regulators and civil society organizations to the DSA review consultation, public through the Commission’s transparency register, focus on three areas where the Brazilian implementation diverges from the European framework in ways that the European drafters did not anticipate.
Judicial enforcement as parallel track to administrative enforcement. The DSA created administrative enforcement through the European Board for Digital Services and national Digital Services Coordinators. In Brazil, the same set of platform duties — transparency, governance, content moderation rules — is enforced primarily through civil litigation in ordinary courts. Plaintiffs file. Judges decide. Damages are awarded. The cumulative effect of thousands of individual rulings shapes platform behavior more rapidly than any administrative authority can. European reviewers are watching whether this is more effective, less effective, or just differently effective than the DSA’s administrative model.
Strict liability for marketplaces under consumer law. The STF imported the Consumer Defense Code’s strict liability standard into platform liability for marketplaces. A platform that hosts a third-party seller selling defective or illegal goods can be held liable as if it were the seller. The DSA, by contrast, maintains conditional liability exemption even for very large marketplaces, with affirmative duties to know-your-business-customer and to act against illegal goods, but without strict liability. The Commission is examining whether the Brazilian strict liability regime produces better consumer outcomes or just shifts cost to platforms without improving market behavior.
The constitutional anchor. The Brazilian regime is constitutional, not statutory. It cannot be repealed by ordinary legislation. It can only be modified by constitutional amendment or by subsequent STF rulings. European regulators, accustomed to the malleability of EU regulation through Commission delegated acts and Council amendments, are reading the Brazilian regime as a stability experiment. If platforms accept a regime they cannot lobby out of, do they comply differently? Do they invest differently? Do they design products differently?
These are not theoretical questions for Brussels. They are inputs into the design of DSA 2.0 and into the calibration of enforcement priorities for the next five years.
The Brussels Effect, examined honestly
There is a body of academic work, much of it published since 2024, that questions whether the Brazilian convergence with European digital regulation deserves the “Brussels Effect” label at all. A study published in Telecommunications Policy in 2024 by researchers who interviewed key participants in the Brazilian Fake News Bill drafting process concluded that the Brussels Effect was limited in Brazil — that the DSA’s language was indeed visible in early drafts of the bill, but that the substantive choices were driven by local platform liability concerns and by the constitutional framework, not by economic or legal pressure to converge with the EU.
The honest reading of the Brazilian regime that has emerged since June 2025 is that the STF ruling is not a transplant of the DSA. It is a constitutional ruling that reaches DSA-like outcomes by a different legal path. The substantive overlap is real. The mechanism is distinct. And the mechanism matters because it determines what happens next.
A statute can be amended. A constitutional ruling can only be revisited by the same court that issued it. The DSA, as ambitious as it is, exists at the level of EU regulation and can be modified through ordinary legislative procedure. The Brazilian platform liability regime exists at the level of constitutional interpretation and is, for practical purposes, immune to lobby capture in the way the DSA is not.
For platforms operating in both markets, this is the calculation that matters. The cost of compliance with the DSA can be amortized against the expected probability that DSA 2.0 will soften some obligations under Member State and industry pressure. The cost of compliance with the Brazilian regime cannot be similarly amortized. The regime is what it is, and the court that defined it has shown no inclination to reopen its central holdings.
What the platforms are doing about it
Meta, Google, X, ByteDance, and Microsoft have all made operational adjustments to their Brazilian operations between July 2025 and May 2026 that go beyond what they have made for any other non-EU jurisdiction in the same period. The adjustments are visible in three areas.
Legal representation. All five companies have expanded their Brazilian legal teams. Meta added a dedicated platform liability practice in São Paulo. Google reorganized its public policy team in Brasília to include a constitutional law unit. X, which had reduced its Brazilian presence sharply in 2023-2024 during the conflict with the STF over content moderation orders, rebuilt a compliance team in early 2026 specifically to interface with the post-Article 19 regime.
Transparency reports. The annual transparency reports that the STF imposed as a duty have begun to appear, with formats that mirror — sometimes line by line — the DSA Article 24 reporting templates. The Commission’s DSA team has noted in informal communications that the Brazilian reports include data the EU has been unable to extract from VLOPs through the formal DSA reporting process.
Product changes. Specific product features that exist globally have been modified for Brazil. Recommendation systems have been adjusted to provide non-profiling options. Notice-and-action systems have been redesigned to comply with the procedural requirements the STF ruled were constitutionally required. Some of these changes have subsequently been rolled out to other markets, including the EU, where the DSA already required them but where platforms had been slower to implement.
The Brazilian regime, in operational terms, is forcing platforms to do faster what the DSA was supposed to make them do anyway.
The DSA review timeline, and what Brasília affects
The DSA review is structured by Article 91. The Commission must submit its first report on the application of the Regulation by 18 February 2027. Public consultation closed in stages through 2025 and 2026, with the largest consultation rounds focused on VLOP designations, risk assessment methodologies, and the cost-benefit balance of administrative enforcement. The Commission’s working documents leaked to legal trade press in March and April 2026 indicate that three areas of the regulation are under active reconsideration.
Risk assessment methodology. The DSA requires VLOPs to assess systemic risks. The methodologies that platforms have used vary widely, and the Commission is preparing standardized methodologies. The Brazilian experience, where the STF effectively imposed risk assessment duties through judicial interpretation rather than through methodology, is being studied for what it reveals about the floor of operationally enforceable risk assessment.
Audit independence. Article 37 of the DSA requires VLOPs to undergo independent audits. The audits conducted in 2024 and 2025 have been criticized for capture by the audited platforms. The Commission is reviewing whether the audit regime needs structural reform. The Brazilian regime, which uses judicial review rather than audit, is a comparator for the costs and benefits of moving away from a pure audit model.
Enforcement coordination. The DSA’s enforcement architecture is split between the Commission (for VLOPs) and national Digital Services Coordinators (for other platforms). This split has produced friction. The Brazilian model — judicial enforcement everywhere, with appellate review — is being examined for whether a different coordination architecture would have produced more rapid and consistent enforcement.
In each of these three areas, the Brazilian regime is the only comparable data set available in 2026. The UK Online Safety Act is closer to the DSA in structure but smaller in scale. The Australian eSafety regime focuses on specific harms. The Brazilian regime is the only one operating at DSA scale, under a different mechanism, on a population that uses the same platforms.
What Mariano Marçal heard in São Paulo
The conversations that produced this analysis took place in São Paulo and Brasília between February and April 2026. Among the people willing to speak on background were lawyers representing the Brazilian operations of three of the named VLOPs, two STF ministers’ chief of staff offices, three academics who participated in the original Marco Civil drafting, and four civil society organizations that filed amicus briefs in the Article 19 proceeding. None of these conversations are quoted directly. The substance is reflected in the analysis above.
What emerged from those conversations was a consistent recognition that Brazil has become, accidentally, the global laboratory for what platform liability looks like when implemented at scale by a non-EU jurisdiction with constitutional anchoring. None of the participants framed this as a victory for Brazilian regulatory sophistication or as a defeat for European regulatory leadership. The framing was more practical. The DSA is the global gold standard for platform liability. The Brazilian implementation is the first credible empirical evidence of how that gold standard performs outside the EU. Both regimes will adjust based on what the Brazilian experiment reveals.
The conversation in Brussels has shifted, in the past eight months, from “the rest of the world is copying us” to “we should pay attention to who is actually implementing similar rules and what they are learning.” This is a healthier conversation than the one that preceded it. It is also a conversation that will produce a different DSA 2.0 than the DSA 1.0 the Commission designed.
The next eighteen months
Three events will mark the next eighteen months of the Brussels-Brasília dialogue. The first is the publication, expected in the third quarter of 2026, of the first wave of Brazilian platform transparency reports under the post-STF regime. The Commission has indicated through informal channels that it will conduct comparative analysis of these reports against the DSA Article 24 reports filed in 2024 and 2025. The comparison will not be neutral. The Brazilian reports are likely to contain data the DSA reports do not, and the Commission will face pressure to explain why.
The second event is the publication of the first Commission report on the application of the DSA, due 18 February 2027. The drafts circulating in mid-2026 are expected to address, at least in footnotes, the comparative performance of judicial versus administrative enforcement of platform liability. Brazil will appear in those footnotes.
The third event is the gradual resolution, through 2026 and 2027, of the early civil cases brought against platforms under the post-Article 19 regime. The Superior Court of Justice (STJ) is the immediate appellate court for these cases, and its rulings will determine how the STF’s constitutional principles translate into day-to-day platform obligations. The body of jurisprudence that emerges will be the most important regulatory document produced anywhere in 2026 on platform liability.
For European drafters of DSA 2.0, all three of these events will be inputs into the redesign. For Latin American jurisdictions considering their own platform liability frameworks — Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Chile — Brazil is the operational model that is available to study, regardless of whether they prefer the European or the U.S. tradition as a starting point.
For platforms, the calculus has shifted. Compliance with the DSA is no longer the only globally binding constraint on platform design. Compliance with the Brazilian regime, anchored constitutionally, may be the more durable one.
Why this is not a Brussels Effect story
The most accurate framing of what has happened in the past eight months is that the Brussels Effect is no longer the right model for understanding regulatory convergence on platform liability. The Brussels Effect describes a process where the EU’s regulatory standards become globally binding because companies operating across jurisdictions standardize to the highest common denominator, which is usually the EU’s.
What has happened in Brazil is not that. The Brazilian regime emerged from a constitutional process that was substantively independent of the DSA. The convergence is real but not driven by economic compliance pressure. It is driven by parallel reading of the same problem — how to regulate platforms while preserving constitutional rights — by two legal systems that arrived at similar answers by different paths.
This is a more interesting story than the Brussels Effect. It is also a more honest one. Brasília did not copy Brussels. Brussels did not copy Brasília. Both regulators looked at the same empirical reality — platforms whose effects on democratic processes, individual rights, and consumer welfare had grown faster than the legal frameworks designed to discipline them — and reached for similar tools.
What changes now, in the next eighteen months, is that these two regimes will operate in parallel under different mechanisms. The empirical record of which mechanism produces what outcomes will be available, comparable, and contestable. That record will shape the next generation of platform liability regulation globally, in ways that neither the Brussels Effect literature nor the original DSA design anticipated.
The conversation moved from Washington to Brasília because Washington exited the conversation when Section 230 became politically untouchable. Brasília did not invite itself in. It simply kept ruling, under constitutional authority, on cases the U.S. system declines to hear.
Methodology and transparency
Methodological note. This analysis combines the published text of the STF June 2025 ruling on Article 19 of the Marco Civil, the consolidated text of EU Regulation 2022/2065 (DSA) including its Article 91 review provisions, public submissions to the European Commission’s DSA review consultation through May 2026, and background conversations conducted in São Paulo and Brasília between February and April 2026 with platform legal representatives, STF ministers’ chief of staff offices, academics, and civil society organizations. None of the background sources are quoted directly.
Primary sources consulted:
- Brazilian Supreme Federal Court (STF), decision on the partial unconstitutionality of Article 19 of the Marco Civil da Internet, 26 June 2025, official publication in the Diário Oficial
- Chambers and Partners, “Brazilian Supreme Court modifies the Internet Civil Framework and expands platform liability”, July 2025
- Montaury Pimenta, “Brazil’s Supreme Court Redefines Platform Liability: Toward a Global Model of Digital Diligence”, February 2026
- Lexology, “Digital Law in Brazil — Current Hot Topics: Brazil’s Supreme Court Redefines Platform Liability”, February 2026
- Internet Society, “Article 19 of the Marco Civil — Guarantee or Threat to the Future of the Brazilian Internet?”, April 2025
- ICLG, “Digital Business Laws and Regulations Report 2025-2026 Brazil”
- Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 (Digital Services Act), consolidated text including Article 91 review provisions
- European Commission, DSA review consultation documents through May 2026
- Telecommunications Policy, “The Brussels Effect in Brazil: Analysing the impact of the EU digital services act on the discussion surrounding the fake news bill”, 2024
- TechPolicy.Press, “Regulating Online Platforms Beyond the Marco Civil in Brazil”, October 2023
- International Bar Association, “Internet regulation — legislative proposals in Brazil”
- Igarapé Institute, “Brazil, the Internet and the Digital Bill of Rights”
Modeled data or in-house estimates:
- The “comparative coverage score” used on the cover is a Diálogo Ciudadano construction. It combines five binary variables per regime: transparency mandate in force, audit requirement, structured redress mechanism, dedicated enforcement capacity, and constitutional or treaty-level anchoring. Each variable contributes weighted points. The resulting scores are: EU DSA 92%, UK Online Safety Act 78%, Brazil post-STF June 2025 71%, Australia eSafety 64%, USA Section 230 status quo 22%. The scores reflect coverage breadth, not enforcement intensity or outcome quality.
- The “eight months” duration referenced repeatedly is calculated from the STF ruling publication (26 June 2025) to the publication date of this piece (21 May 2026). The duration is observational, not modeled.
What this piece does not assert:
- It does not assert that the Brazilian regime is superior to or inferior to the DSA. The comparison is structural, not normative.
- It does not assert that the Brazilian STF ruling was modeled on the DSA. The published court documents do not establish that influence directly. The structural similarity is documented; the causal claim is not.
- It does not assert that the European Commission has made any formal decision about the DSA review based on Brazilian inputs. The Commission’s working documents referenced are those leaked to legal trade press in March-April 2026 and represent draft thinking, not final decisions.
- It does not identify nominally the platform legal representatives, STF chief of staff offices, or academics consulted in background interviews. Quotation is not used. The substance of the conversations is reflected in synthesis form.
Conflicts of interest. Diálogo Ciudadano receives no funding from the platforms named (Meta, Google, X, ByteDance, Microsoft), from the EU institutions, from STF, from ANPD, or from the law firms cited as sources. The editorial line is bilingual and independent. The author, Mariano Marçal, is Diálogo Ciudadano’s Brazil correspondent and resides in São Paulo.
Editorial production. This piece was produced in May 2026 by the Diálogo Ciudadano editorial team using software-assisted workflows, including search, source organization, and drafting tools. Verification of every figure, attribution of every source, and the argumentative line are human editorial responsibility. Any error is the responsibility of the newsroom.
Last updated: 21 May 2026, 19:00 GMT. This piece will be updated when (a) the Brazilian Superior Court of Justice (STJ) issues its first appellate rulings on cases brought under the post-Article 19 regime; (b) the European Commission publishes its first DSA review report due February 2027; (c) the first wave of Brazilian platform transparency reports under the STF regime becomes public.