The Internet in Brazil

Chapter 1: The Strategic Importance of the Internet for Brazil’s Development


Both Brazilians and international observers are prone to contradictory views of Brazil's future. An Austrian immigrant, Stefan Zweig, coined the expression “Brazil, a Country of the Future” the title of an insightful book published in 1941. On a more pessimistic note, Brazilians often say that Brazil is the country of the future, and always will be. During the military dictatorship (1964-1985) propaganda boasted that “Brazil was the country of the future, but now the future has arrived”, an optimistic expression repeated by United States President Barak Obama during a visit to Rio de Janeiro in 2011.

At the beginning of 2014 the mood was more somber. Economic growth has been anemic over the past three years, inflation is on the rise, and the Brazilians' evaluation of their own politicians had reached a new low. In June 2013, millions of demonstrators, largely mobilized over the Internet, took to the streets in cities around the country to protest corruption, impunity, and poor public services. Many expect that mass protests of this kind will be repeated during the World Cup soccer matches to take place in June and July 2014.

In April, before the World Cup, another, less publicized international event was hosted in Brazil, the Global Multistakeholder Meeting on the Future of Internet Governance, also dubbed NETmundial. Brazil has been a leader in developing and implementing multistakeholder governance of the Internet, where government, private sector, academia, civil society organizations and Internet professionals perform this function. Brazil's model of Internet governance, embodied in the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee (Comitê Gestor da Internet no Brasil – CGI.br), was under close scrutiny during NETmundial.

Since 2009, Brazilians have also been preparing legislation, called the Civil Rights Framework for the Internet (Marco Civil da Internet) that establishes principles, guarantees, rights and obligations for the use of the Internet in Brazil. This legislation was also be closely studied by participants in NETmundial. But the process by which this legislation has been developed may also be seen as a model for other countries and indeed for the international institutions involved in Internet governance. This process has been thorough, highly participatory, democratic, and has made ample use of the Internet (websites, wikis, blogs, social networks, etc.). It may herald a new, more modern mode of policy making – something of which Brazilians can be proud.

This book examines how the Internet came to Brazil, how it has developed, how it is governed, and why its future development is strategic for achieving national goals. This chapter deals with the last of these issues, presenting arguments for putting the Internet at the center of Brazil's strategy for achieving better future.

Background: Brazil in a nutshell

Brazil is the largest and arguably the most important country in Latin America. With an estimated population of 202 million in February 2014, it is also the most populous. In 2012 Brazil's economy was the seventh largest in the world according to four separate estimates by the United Nations, the IMF, the World Bank, and the CIA, ranging from US$ 2.3 to 2.4 trillion. Per capital income was US$11,354 in 2012, or 60th highest in the world according to the IMF, well above China's US$6071, but half of South Korea's.

Brazil also has well-known weaknesses. Though income inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient (running from zero for perfect equality to 1 for absolute inequality) has fallen from .57 in 1997 to .50 in 2012 according to the official Brazilian statistical agency, it is still a serious problem. Of the BRICS countries, only South Africa has a higher degree of income concentration, according to both the United Nations and CIA estimates for the latest years available. Other broad indicators put Brazil way down in the rankings. For example, the World Economic Forum's (WEF) competitiveness ranking for Brazil in its 2013-2014 report was 56 out of 148 countries, though it was the best of the BRICS countries except for China, ranked 29th. South Korea ranked 25th. The WEF competitiveness index includes a very wide range of sub-indicators covering national policies, institutions, and factors affecting productivity (e.g. education, health, innovation, and infrastructure).

The Internet and the information and communications revolution

The Internet is a great invention of the 20th Century that is changing the civilization of the 21st Century. Its power grows with the fiber optic cables that are now the nerves of the world economy. No other technology permits greater speed of transmission nor generates greater economies of scale at such a low cost as fiber optic cables. Thanks to this worldwide system of storing, organizing and sharing information, 90% of the data that exists in the world today was created over the past two years. In 2012, every day 2.5 quintillion bytes (exabytes – that is 1 followed by 18 zeros) of data were created. Meanwhile, in June 2013, the number of Internet users reached 2.4 billion, 34% of the world’s population, an increase of 566% since the year 2000.

This enormous flood of data is expected to double every two years through 2020, propelled by the increase in Internet users and their increasing consumption and production of video, among other factors.

The Internet has become the world’s most important means of processing information, comparable to the invention of the printing press with moveable type by Johannes Gutenberg, that has expanded access to the printed word and the horizons of human knowledge since the 15th century. In that time paper and ink were fundamental. Today the physical means of communication are fiber optic cables, supplemented by satellites and terrestrial wireless technologies. Extending over land, under oceans or in space, together they are creating the essential infrastructure of the 21st century.

Fiber optic cables and the rapidly expanding processing power of computers are reshaping economies worldwide. Packets of data, text, voice and image are sent over these cables, reduced to zeros and ones transmitted over the Internet using TCP/IP (Transport Control Protocol/Internet Protocol). Combined with other information and communication technologies (ICT), the Internet is a tool with multiple uses that strengthens economic and social development as well as political participation. More and more, all forms of electronic communication – including telephony, Internet, radio and television – are being transmitted over the Internet on fiber optic cables.

Brazil has to move fast to accompany these developments. The Internet’s growth in Brazil is being encouraged by federal, state and municipal governments, incumbent and insurgent telecommunications companies in large and medium-sized cities, and small Internet service providers (ISPs) that I call broadband pioneers. These small ISPs have played an important role in digital inclusion of the population, including in remote areas of the country that face many challenges.

The huge increase in the processing power of chips, and the devices that contain them (computers, tablets, smartphones, etc.), has drastically reduced the cost of transmitting, processing, and storing data, making knowledge cheaper and more accessible throughout the world. Communication based on the Internet protocols is rapidly substituting the older technologies and the business models based upon them. ....