Brazil's lower house approves civil internet bill

After over two years of discussions and five months blocking congressional activities, the hotly debated Marco Civil da Internet (civil internet bill) was finally approved by Brazil's lower house on Tuesday night.

The project, considered an internet "constitution" with the rights, duties and principles of use, will now be sent to the senate for approval prior to becoming law.

As expected, the text was subject to modifications to its more controversial aspects that had been preventing the vote taking place, particularly regarding network neutrality.

The neutrality concept, one of the core pillars of the project, is the principle that internet service providers cannot discriminate between different kinds of content, applications online and network usage. Users cannot be charged more depending on what they access or do in the web, for example. Telcos claimed that neutrality harms innovation.

The bill stated it was the responsibility of the presidential office to oversee potential exceptions to the neutrality rule, which should be made by decree. The new version kept this power for the president, as foreseen by the country's constitution, but made clearer that any such decision can only be made following consultation with telecoms regulator Anateland the country's internet steering committee CGI. CGI is an advisory board formed by members of the private and public sector.

As previously reported, the new version also pulled out the criticized article requiring foreign ISPs to keep datacenters in Brazil for data storage.

This local storage requirement was not part of the first version of the Marco Civil, having been added following government pressure in response to the NSA electronic espionage case. The government understanding was that the measure would automatically put all data management under Brazilian legislation. Google had questioned this argument.

Although the local storage obligation has been removed from the Marco Civil, a new article states that the Brazilian legislation will apply "irrespective of where data is stored" and where companies are registered.

The bill was approved almost unanimously by all parties in the house. Even the government's main ally, the PMDB party, whose opposition over some aspects of the bill became stronger after a political deadlock, changed opinion and endorsed the project.

The only party to vote against it was the opposition party PPS, which considered that the president's power to decree the potential exceptions to net neutrality would represent "excessive control" by the executive branch over the internet.

In his speech prior to the voting session, the bill's author Alessandro Molon detailed the latest version of the text and announced other changes to it, which met requests by other lawmakers and public sector entities and were necessary to build consensus.

Among them, an article was added to tackle so-called "porn revenge," following a request from a group of women's legislators.

According to the Marco Civil, providers will only be made liable for third party content if they ignore a legal decision requiring its removal - and not a mere user notification, for example. However, the text treats pornographic content differently.

In this case, pages that provide images or videos that infringe on the privacy of others without permission of the participants will be made liable for the violation. The text has been modified making it clear that notification from the victim or his/her legal representative is enough to take it down.

The bill also allows for "parental control," through which parents can control the material accessed by children and adolescents in the network.

Marco Civil also states that internet access providers - the telcos - must keep user logs (IPs and user connection times) for a year. ISPs such as Google, on the other hand, will have to keep browser logs for six months. Prior to the change, the logs record time was at the discretion of providers and sites. All data can only be accessed through a court ruling.