Is Facebook the Internet? Ethnographic Perspectives on Open Internet Governance in Brazil

Abstract

This article explores the ideals of open Internet governance in Brazil. I examine Brazil’s Internet law, the Marco Civil da Internet (MCI), which promotes the right to Internet access, online privacy, and net neutrality. The MCI’s ideals of a free and open Internet are challenged by Internet companies, such as Facebook, which offer “zero-rating” promotions that provide limited, free mobile data to low-income subscribers. I juxtapose the ideals of openness embodied in the regulatory sphere of the MCI with those of Brazil’s cultura livre (free culture) movement to show the ascendance of open values in Brazilian governance and culture. Accordingly, I employ the rhetorical question, “Is Facebook the Internet?” to demonstrate the ways in which commitments to open Internet governance, expressed in both the cultural and regulatory realms, run counter to the more proprietary ideals of the transnational tech community.

Convergence and nuances of Net Neutrality in South America

“…Dado que no es posible hacer esto sin la necesaria discriminación de datos según el origen, destino o contenido, esta práctica actúa contra los principios básicos de la NR [33], [38]. Estos planes son ofrecidos en los cinco países analizados, creando consumidores cautivos, aun cuando en algunos de ellos, esta práctica está prohibida [34], [42].…”

“…Como una novedad, el decreto prohíbe estrategias ZR, incluye un sistema tripartito para supervisar y determina que las empresas de contenido deben tener oficinas legales en Brasil [32]. Sin embargo, cuando en 2018, las asociaciones de consumidores y otras organizaciones de la sociedad civil evaluaron las prácticas ZR como negativas y afirmaban que violaban la NR, los operadores privados y agentes regulatorios afirmaron que la NR fue limitada específicamente al nivel lógico e infraestructura del Internet, por lo que las prácticas de mercado no violan la NR [33], [34].…”

Relational legal consciousness and anticorruption: Lava Jato, social media interactions, and the co-production of law's detraction in Brazil (2017–2019)

“…This makes Brazil the fourth largest internet market in the world per the latest estimates (http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users-by-country/). See Omari (2020) for ethnographic data on this pervasiveness.…”

Code Ethnography and the Materiality of Power in Internet Governance

“…Internet governance is an interdisciplinary field dedicated to the comprehension of the power dynamics shaping how the internet works in its multiple layers, from infrastructure to applications, and ethnographic methods have been used to study it less frequently than other approaches (for exceptions see Flyverbom 2011;Omari 2020;Vicentin 2016). Nonetheless, the increasing dissemination of ethnography to disciplines beyond anthropology, including sociology (Burrell 2012;Jaton 2021), the popularization of science and technology studies within internet governance (Musiani 2015), and the way that technical objects of study familiar to internet governance scholars have generated interest in multiple disciplines (Ramos and Freitas 2017) may render this approach more present.…”