#marcocivil

[ecologiadigital]

Em linhas gerais, a proposta do Ministério da Justiça estabelece que apenas questões técnicas podem ser usadas como argumento para a quebra da neutralidade. E ai vem a primeira polêmica do texto. Na lista entra “congestionamento de redes” e tratamento de “questões de qualidade”.

[ipolitico]

A Tour of Brazil`s Internet Hub

Hub without a horizon, by Florian Martin-Bariteau.

São Paulo is a massive hub that linking Brazil in physical, economic and virtual networks. It is home to around 20 million people, an economic engine with the country’s stock exchange and over 12% of the country’s GDP. In informational terms, it is home to every major tech company operating in Brazil, from Facebook and Google to Apple and Airbnb, and it also happens to host the largest Internet Exchange Point (IXP) in Latin America, a critical bank of servers in a network that helps route traffic for the entire continent. 

The infrastructure of cities once only consisted of roads, pipes and electical wiring, physical things, but now besides hardware and wires, it is also software and wireless, both fixed networks and mobile. These networks are managed by technicians, engineers, administrators that run the apps, websites, databases and infrastructure itself. It is used by governments, businesses, schools, hospitals and individual citizens in a variety of ways, now all tied together by cell phones, wifi, laptops and an increasing number of devices that are not traditional computers, what is becoming “The Internet of Things”.

Last week, as a Global Fellow at the Institute of Technology and Society, I took a tour of São Paulo and Brasilia that helps to illuminate how this virtual world is all tied together in these cities. ITS is a NGO based in Rio de Janeiro headed by Ronaldo Lemos and some of the colleagues who helped draft, pass through Congress, and now implement the Brazilian “Bill of Rights” for the Internet, known here as the Marco Civil da Internet. This is the first in a series of two posts to review my trip and describe how the Brazilian Internet operates, first in its business capital São Paulo, and secondly in its political capital, Brasilia. 

The Marco Civil is important because it represents a movement to try to regulate the network here in a way that is open, democratic and collaborative, and incorporates a number of principals that exemplify these goals, including net neutrality, security, privacy, freedom of expression, diversity, transparency and universality. Our tour was partly an exploration of how this law, passed in 2014, along with new online technologies and regulation, are beginning to change society to create a new reality.

In São Paulo, we started our meeting with the Comitê Gestor da Internet, or Internet Steering Committee, which itself serves as a kind of hub where all different stakeholders in the Brazilian Internet can meet, consult on both technical and legal codes and give their opinions on how the network should best be managed. The committee contains representatives from the government, businesses, the technical community, civil society and academia. It also serves as the place where the Brazilians coordinate their security, domain names systems and other Critical Internet Resources, discuss and develop policies and consult with Congress as it debates and passes legislation. The Marco Civil represents one such example of this political process as it grew from a resolution that the CGI proposed in 2009 that laid out principals for Internet governance that came to define the law. It is an interesting space that physically illustrates the connections between the political and technical, as the committee meets feet from servers that help track and manage the Brazilian Internet. One can see it through a window in the room, commissioners can vote while servers hum in the background of their conversation.

CGI’s nerve center. (FMB) 

From there, we moved to an interesting discussion of the evolving online political landscape at the co-working space Vila Civica, where different groups shared a space to develop political campaigns online. There was Catarse, a Brazilian crowdfunder like Indygogo, Parade Vida, an artist collective focused on political awareness through the art of the street cart, and a host of smaller organizations that used the space to build online campaigns, work and network. It is a small but vital representation of civil society’s participation in the democratic process online.

In a stark contrast, we followed this up by visiting Google’s penthouse suite, two massive floors of a skyscraper in the heart of São Paulo, including a deck with amazing views of the largest metropolis in South America. A representative from Google discussed all aspects of the company’s strategy in Latin America from their approach to privacy, mentioning they are working on app specific privacy settings in the new Android M platform and a special Google Privacy Working Group that uses a tool called Hubble to zoom in on specific areas of the company to see if they are applying policies correctly. We also talked about net neutrality and zero rating, where services such as Facebook, WhatsApp and Wikipedia offer their services for free through certain cell providers. It is currently a hot topic, made hotter by Facebook’s Internet.org initiative to provide Facebook and other apps free of charge through a proprietary app, and the Google guy offered a slight endorsement, saying that the Marco Civil does not explicitly prevent such initiatives because cell phone providers are not fundamentally changing the underlying network protocol.

The view from “o googleplex”. (FMB)

On day two we moved onto discussions with one of these internet service providers, Vivo, which is now controlled by the Spanish consortium Telefonica. Vivo is the largest cell phone provider in Brazil, controlling nearly 30% of the market, and their perspective was interesting.

They expressed skepticism that zero rating programs were legal under the Marco Civil. Vivo reps believed their rival provider TIM was providing a potentially illegal service when it continued offering WhatsApp and Facebook free after users ran out of credit, while saying that another competitor, Claro, had it right when it would cut users off from all services when they ran out of money, while still offering the apps gratis when a user had data credit.

Two representatives from the central office of Telefonica in Spain seemed to contradict the staff members in Brazil at points on net neutrality, as the Spaniards said they needed the ability to manage high bandwidth traffic such as video by treating it differently. While not explicitly saying they wanted to abrogate net neutrality, they seemed to say it was their prerogative to manage the network how they wished as a technical exception specified by the law.

Another component of the talk focused on their smart cities initiatives in Santader, Spain as well as a small pilot in Aguas de Sao Pedro here in Brazil. While it seemed like they had achieved some success in developing better traffic management and crowd controls, they seemed unprepared to answer questions on their plans for securing these systems and ensuring user privacy, when we asked they said they had not developed specific plans for protecting the data gathered by such initiatives. This contradicts the idea that security should be baked in from the start, despite protests that these are only pilots, it is something they need to be focusing on now. It isn’t like security isn’t a priority in their operations. We visited their command center deep in the basement of the headquarters and saw real time traffic management, and their cybersecurity spokesman commented that almost all of their traffic still passes through the US despite the NSA scandal, and they mostly run American equipment such as Intel, Cisco and Dell. Where else is there to go?

This is from 2007, not a lot has changed, yet... "World map of submarine cables" by Rarelibra.

We spoke with members of the São Paulo government for another perspective on how they would work on making “Smart Cities” a reality, and they are working on a “São Paulo Aberta” (Open Sao Paulo) plan, whose goal is to make the city’s government more open, participatory and accountable to the public. With a budget of around 100 million dollars, they had moved to set programs to allow citizens to comment on the budget process, give them access and tools to understand the city’s “big data” and create innovative apps for transport tracking. Many of the tools developed by the city and local participants were shared on GitHub, and seemed that they were taking admirable steps in the right direction to involve the public in their own governance through new technology and the Internet.

While they said that they were not coordinating directly with the federal government on these programs or collaborating with other cities in any organized way, it seems that São Paulo’s bureaucrats are taking cues directly from the democratic and collaborative governance principals of the Marco Civil. On our tour we met users, application and service providers, content creators and administrators of the hub and how they all played different roles in this new online society. In the next stop on our journey, Brasilia, we were going to see how the political management of these networks operate, and how the Marco Civil is being implemented in a capital built with a totally different future in mind.

[luvieiraaa-blog]

#StopMarcoCivil Todos Contra a Ditadura Virtual - Anonymous

O que mais preocupa não é nem o grito dos violentos, dos corruptos, dos desonestos, dos sem caráter, dos sem ética. O que mais preocupa é o silêncio dos bons.

[ecologiadigital]

A intenção é retomar o polêmico “direito ao esquecimento”, que pode levar à remoção definitiva de conteúdos na rede, prejudicando o debate político

[ipolitico]

Democracy Comes Online

Network neutrality has become the defining issue in the fight for democratic Internet governance, and it is worth exploring the battlegrounds as a way of understanding why and how it has come to the forefront of international debates. Governments, corporations and civil society are working to define how the Internet operates in Brazil, India, the United States, and around the world. This involves a mix of both technical standards and the policies that shape them, sometimes in cooperation, sometimes in confrontation.

Brazil provides one of the largest and most powerful examples of a country grappling with how to implement network neutrality. As the largest population, economy and national network in Latin America, they are also leaders the space of Internet governance with the support of their new “Bill of Rights” for the Internet, the Marco Civil. It contains provisions that directly address net neutrality, including an entire section of the bill. Certain articles, including an entire section, are devoted to net neutrality and now dictate that ISPs may not discriminate against traffic for political, economic or reasons other than government mandated emergency management.

For the entire month of March, the Brazilian government solicited comments on how these provisions should be implemented and enforced through Cultura Digital, the same online public forum that started the open process to define the bill in 2009. This spirit of “open and democratic governance”, itself a key principle of the bill, continues today with the invitation for comments on the implementation and upcoming laws concerning privacy. ANATEL, the public telecom regulator, opened another one to discuss its role in the net neutrality process in April. Showing how once closed governance processes can be transformed both by the new technical systems and laws that give the public more input and access than ever before.

In the U.S, Americans have seen a similar seismic shift in the way that they interact with the government, now mediated through the Internet. Last year, after a court struck down existing telecom “Open Internet” regulations forcing ISPs to maintain neutral networks, The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) (ANATEL’s analogue) had a similar, extraordinary open comments period that led it to classify ISPs as common carriers. Over 1 million people commented through the FCC’s website over the course of the process, setting a historical precedent, and at one point overwhelming the FCC’s servers.  Under this new definition, ISPs now have to provide Internet in the same way that traditional telecoms provide phone service, more like electricity, water, or any other utility. Communications under this definition will be more heavily regulated to ensure that they do not give more access of certain kin ds of content. Imagine if people had a branded Coke dispenser in every house that was cheaper to use than water, which beverage would people drink more?

The FCC is now doing battle with the telecoms over the power to force them to follow this new definition of the law, and their lobbying companies have sued to stop this process, along with another suit by one of the largest telecom companies in the U.S., AT&T. Ironically, this is the same company that the government broke into pieces in the 80s after the FCC found its regulated monopoly on American telephones breached the Communications Act, a law from 1934 that now helps to define net neutrality.

In both cases, the laws that built net neutrality were shaped by the same forces, public input through the Internet, showing how this technology is changing the way citizens interact with governments in fundamental ways, most directly in the form of the way that we are challenging them to govern the network itself. Harvard cyberlaw expert Yochai Benkler calls this concept the “networked public sphere”.

Brazil has consistently set precedents for moving political and civic processes online, from electronic voting in the 90s to online banking to the modern Marco Civil process and an Internet Steering Committee that guided it throughout. In the US, the process is more haphazard and market driven, but both countries are moving in a similar direction, especially when it comes to net neutrality. This neutrality principal transforms the equality provisions that we enjoy in democracies to the online space, while the passion the issue elicits is also the catalyst for debates about what an truly open, free and democratic Internet means.

This brings us to the third example of how this debate can operate. In India this month, Facebook found itself in the midst of a firestorm as its Internet.org initiative came under fire for abrogating net neutrality. Internet.org is a Facebook application to give free access to certain websites like Wikipedia, Bing as well as Facebook through deals it has made with telecom providers in India and eight other countries. Facebook Zero and other “Zero Rating” services offer cell phone users in many countries free access, a seemingly good deal for poor Internet users who do not want to pay for data plans.

However, groups like Net Neutrality India and savetheinternet.in argued that this is a direct attack on the principals of a democratic Internet because it is favoring certain kind of commercialized content as well as more philanthropic or news sites, and encourages users to access certain kinds of services that profit specific groups, and dissuade them from using others. Because of this conflict, the civil society campaign successfully persuaded news companies like the BBC, the Times of India and apps like FlipKart and ClearTrip, shopping and travel companies to drop from Internet.org. As in the U.S. and Brazil, India is struggling with regulating the Internet, specifically around this big, looming issue, and the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), currently considering various models of legislation as it approaches the same debate. Over 750,000 emails inundated TRAI in the past month through Savetheinternet.in and other channels, mirroring the deluge of public comment in the U.S. and Brazil.

Countries all over the world are facing these issues, along with a host of others such as online security or user privacy and copyright. Net neutrality, however, has become the defining issue of our new democratic information age, and it is through this prism that the global community will continue to discuss these issues in a variety of similar contexts.

[jornalnarede]

O outro lado da moeda. 

[robsonbsampaio]

#Emicida finaliza mais um dia histórico para a #ArenaNETMundial , que começou ontem com aprovação do #MarcoCivil da #Internet #Participabr

[dogonho]

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Muja conosco!

https://www.facebook.com/espiritodevaca

[segundodiadasemana-blog]

Governo brasileiro quer estender Marco Civil da Internet ao mundo

Os defensores do Marco Civil da Internet gostaram tanto da ideia de regulamentar o ambiente digtal que agora vão propor uma resolução com os mesmos princípios para efeito mundial. O texto concluído ontem pelo Comitê Gestor da Internet (CGI.br) será apresentado no NETmundial, fórum que reunirá entidades responsáveis pela governança da internet, em São Paulo, no fim de abril.

Demi Getschko, conselheiro do CGI e pioneiro da internet brasileira, explica que o projeto é uma simplificação de um documento da entidade que serviu de base para a elaboração do Marco Civil local. O conselheiro se reuniu essa semana com o deputado federal e relator do Marco, Alessandro Molon (PT-RJ), para discutir os impactos econômicos da regulação da internet no país.

"A chance de criarmos uma legislação única para a internet é pequena", diz Getschko. "Por isso, estamos propondo uma versão mais simples", afirmou Getschko. Não há, por enquanto, informações detalhadas sobre a proposta que o Brasil pretende apresentar ao mundo.

Rodrigo Parra, vice-presidente na América Latina da Icann, entidade que faz a gestão técnica da web nos EUA, elogiou a iniciativa brasileira. “O modelo multissetorial do CGI é único no mundo; o Marco Civil, lei da maior importância, também é único. Juntos, mostram a maturidade do Brasil e, justificam o por que de o NETmundial acontecer aqui”.

Aprovado há duas semanas na Câmara dos Deputados, o texto do Marco Civil da Internet brasileira será submetido ao crivo do Senado Federal. Caso siga adiante, o Projeto de Lei 2.126/2011 terá criado uma legislação que determina direitos e deveres de todos os brasileiros conectados – incluindo governos, empresas que fornecem conexão e as que são responsáveis por serviços de e-mail, sites, redes sociais etc.

Fonte: Olhar Digital

[ecologiadigital]

Tramitam em conjunto no Congresso Nacional três projetos de lei que podem piorar sensivelmente o cenário da regulação do uso da Internet no Brasil

[marketingporconteudo-blog]

A Câmara dos Deputados finalmente aprovou, na última terça-feira, o Marco Civil da Internet, que regulamenta as atividades na rede. O projeto ainda precisa passar pelo Senado. Entenda as mudanças que o marco traz para quem trabalha diariamente no digital.

[ipolitico]

Marco Civil on the Move

Parabens! (Agência Brasil)

Last week, the Brazilian internet “bill of rights” passed out of Brazil’s Lower House with nearly unanimous support. Last minute politicking removed the provision that would have given the Executive legal authority to force multinationals to store Brazilian data in country. However, deputies added strong penalties for providers that do not keep track of and provide user data in cases of police investigation, including a fine of up to 10% of a company’s profits in country and possibly even a temporary ban on domestic activity.

This is significant both because of new cybersecurity laws that passed in 2013 and Brazil’s strong penchant for pursuing criminal investigations and requesting takedowns for illegal or defamatory content. The former actually represent the reason civil society groups, the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee and the Ministry of Justic started the Marco Civil, reasoning that there shouldn’t be penalties without rights and responsibilities online. Regarding the latter, Brazil is already second to the U.S. in terms of take down requests made to Google, mostly for blog posts criticizing political figures. A local state government arrested the head of Google Brazil in 2012 for failing to comply with court orders to take down content libeling candidates in a mayoral campaign. Hopefully the law can help clarify the legality of what has become a contentious and politicized issue and define different responsibilities for online publishers.

Net neutrality remains a core tenet of the law, and Dep. Alessandro Molon, the rapporteur for the bill, defended it against lobbying from the telecom industry, which secured an amendment to specify they could offer access at different speeds for different prices, but no discrimination in terms of content. Later attempts by Dep. Eduardo Cunha, the head of the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB) in the Congress to contest the wording of the net neutrality provisions failed.  Cunha was also the head of the telecom agency for Rio de Janeiro, Telerj when the entire telecom system was still under the control of Telebras, the national public telecom utility. The government of Fernando Collor de Mello attempted to privatize Telebras under Cunha’s watch in the early 1990s but failed due to opposition in Congress, interesting history to consider given his current role in the bill’s progress. The system wasn’t privatized until 1998 under the leadership of a successive administration which also created the Telecommunications Laws that govern the internet and Brazil’s telecom regulatory  agency, Anatel, today.

The government also removed requirements that would have required Internet companies such as Google, Microsoft and Facebook to host their data in country. This became another contentious matter, from both the perspective of I.T. professionals who recognized the difficulty of verifying Brazilian user data, and partisans who were unwilling to give the executive more powers online. For now, there appears to be a lack of political will to force localization of data, but the government will continue to exert a strong influence over global internet companies that want to serve Brazilian internet users.

The bill now goes to the Senate, where it seems assured passage because of the ruling Workers Party (PT) control of the body, perhaps with further amendments before it returns to the house for final approval. The government is pushing hard to get it passed as its first priority of the legislative year before an international meeting on internet governance in São Paulo this April. If it succeeds, President Rousseff and her representatives will have concrete legislation to point to when they argue for a stronger multistakeholder internet governance model worldwide.

[dogonho]

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