Brazil’s new child protection law has gained less global press than its new digital competition bill. However, the two are complementary efforts that demonstrate how governments must rethink how different regulatory concerns and mandates blend into one another in the digital economy.
Brazil has joined the club of countries that have proposed legal changes to tackle market power in digital markets. The Brazilian government sent the Digital Fair Competition Act (DFCA) to Congress in September 2025. The bill aims to amend the Brazilian Competition Act and create a process to designate “economic agents with systemic relevance” in digital markets (similar to the gatekeeper status found in the European Union’s Digital Markets Act that applies to Big Tech companies like Alphabet and Meta). The details of the DFCA have been well explained on ProMarket here and here, but briefly it seeks to equip Brazil’s competition authority, the Administrative Council for Economic Defense (CADE), with new tools to address structural competition problems associated with dominant platforms. DFCA reflects familiar concerns in global antitrust debates, such as high levels of concentration, self-preferencing, and the limitations of ex post enforcement tools. The bill is part of the Digital Brazil Agenda, a program crafted by the federal government to establish regulatory instruments and economic policies that foster Brazil’s digital economy.
While the DFCA is expected to go through a lengthy legislative process in Congress, the Brazilian government has already passed an important piece of legislation that has not received much attention for how it will impact competition and markets. As part of the Digital Brazil Agenda, the country enacted the Digital Statute for Children and Adolescents (ECA Digital) on September 17, extending the country’s longstanding child-protection framework to digital products and services.
The fact that the government chose to simultaneously pursue both child protection and the explicit promotion of competition in digital environments signals an intense intersection between the two. They represent a complementary regulatory strategy to address platform power and how it manifests to harm vulnerable users.
Many practices that harm children are also mechanisms through which dominant platforms entrench market power, such as data collection, manipulative interfaces, and exploitative monetization. This article argues that Brazil’s reforms represent an opportunity to develop a more integrated attitude towards digital governance. However, overlapping mandates may create legal uncertainty and ultimately weaken the goals of the digital agenda.
The ECA Digital and a rights-based framework for child protection
The ECA Digitalis a major evolution of Brazil’s Statute of the Child and Adolescent, a foundational child-rights statute passed in 1990. The new law responds to the fact that children are increasingly exposed to digital environments, from social media to online gaming, and to new and previously unknown risks to their well-being.
The first draft bill of what would become ECA Digital was introduced to Congress in 2022. It was the object of great discussion by civil society and organizations involved in digital governance and data protection. At the time the bill was introduced, some members of Congress expressed concerns that the bill could lead to possible censorship on the internet and curtail freedom of expression, given the responsibilities it would place on large digital platforms to monitor and sometimes restrict conversation. The final version addressed some of these concerns.
The draft bill had also included an express mention of the “duty of care” owed by digital service providers to users. Duty of care, which requires digital platforms to protect children from illegal and harmful content, is the backbone of the United Kingdom Online and Safety Act, passed in 2023, and the Digital Services Act of the EU, both sources of inspiration to Brazilian lawmakers (see research on the topic by Francisco Brito Cruz, Beatriz Kira, and Ivar A. Hartmann here). The term was suppressed in the final version of the bill. According to the reporting member of Congress, it was too vague and broad, potentially giving rise to disproportionate interpretations. It was replaced by the duty of the providers to “prevent, protect, [and] inform… in the best interests of the child and adolescent.”
Another important addition to the final text of the bill relates to gambling. According to the approved version of ECA Digital, the providers must take reasonable measures to prevent and mitigate risks of access to gambling, betting, and other products whose sale to children is prohibited. That inclusion makes even more sense when one realizes that Brazil is the fifth largest betting market in the world.
Despite some contention over fears of censorship and freedom of search, the ECA passed with large support. The protection of children and adolescents on the internet is hard to argue against. In fact, enactment of ECA Digital gained serious momentum in August 2025 when Brazilian influencer Felca (with over six million subscribers on YouTube)published a video titled “Adultization” on his YouTube channel.
In his almost 50-minute-long video, Felca exposed the exploitation of children and teenagers on digital platforms. The video didactically explains how an algorithm may be trained to deliver sexually explicit content of children to users with predatory intentions. The video gained rapid traction among Brazilians and reached members of Congress. The video has been watched more than 50 million times and has led to several arrests on charges of sexual exploitation of minors.
Right after the turmoil ignited by Felca’s video, the House of Representatives approved an expedited procedure for the bill. The House then cleared the bill two days after, and the Senate approved it the following week. The bill ultimately passed within less than a month after Felca uploaded his video and will come into force on March 17, 2026. The popular support for the bill after the video was overwhelming, and no Congressmember dared to vote against it.
The ECA Digital has a broad scope and imposes a series of obligations on companies that offer digital services or products to children or that can be “probably accessed” by them. It is a framework based on risk. It also applies to firms, regardless of the location of the service, stressing the extraterritorial application of the law: if the service is offered or accessed by Brazilian users, the law would apply. One of the most important obligations is that firms must adopt age verification mechanisms for their products and services that are not suitable for minors under the age of eighteen, expressly mentioning pornography as an example. However, providers of other intermediary services, such as app stores and operational systems, must take measures to verify a user’s age and allow for parental supervision tools (the original text of the bill mentioned “control” instead of supervision).
The law also prohibits the profiling of minors for targeted advertising on digital platforms, recognizing the risks of psychological manipulation and privacy harms. Specifically on social media, the ECA Digital establishes that any accounts of children under the age of sixteen must be linked to the account of a legal guardian. Moreover, social media providers must take the initiative to inform all users about unsuitable content for children and constantly monitor it.
These requirements have not just worried defenders of free speech. Some Brazilian users of Roblox have already protested against the new law due to rule changes to the game’s chatting feature, which now prevent children from engaging with adult users. Although, these rules were launched worldwide, and the law has not yet come into force.
Enforcement of the ECA Digital’s provisions will be up to the National Data Protection Agency (ANPD), which received new competencies to enforce the protection of children in the digital environment. ANPD was upgraded from an “authority” responsible for data protection to an administrative agency, granting it more independence in decision-making and budgetary oversight. It also increases funding for staff. The agency will be responsible for editing rules and procedures to ensure the correct application of ECA Digital, as well as having the power to impose sanctions on providers that do not comply with the law.
ECA Digital establishes four possible sanctions, regardless of other civil, criminal, and administrative procedures. According to the new law, providers that do not comply with ECA Digital are subject to (i) a warning, with a curing period of 30 days to cease the lack of compliance; (ii) fines of up to 10% of the turnover in Brazil or, in the absence of turnover, the fine will be set between 10 Brazilian reals and 1,000 per user, up to a total of 50 million Brazilian reals; (iii) temporary suspension of the service; and (iv) prohibition of the service.
While ECA Digital is explicitly grounded in child-rights protection, its focus on platform architecture and business models places it within broader debates about digital market governance.
The path towards a coordinated digital governance
Brazil’s dual digital economy reforms present a unique opportunity for regulatory synergy. As an example, the transparency and audit obligations imposed under the ECA Digital for platforms with more than one million users may lower informational barriers for the competition investigations that the DFCA will enable CADE to undertake. Conversely, competition remedies such as imposing interoperability between different companies’ services may reduce incentives for exploitative designs that harm children. However, there are coordination challenges that both the ANPD and CADE must bear in mind to achieve the expected goals of protecting children and promoting competition.
The legal competencies of both agencies must be sharply defined. When enforcing the ECA Digital, the ANPD should lead on defining and assessing the safety of children on digital platforms, where the competition authority remains responsible for overseeing market structure and imposing remedies. CADE and ANPD already have a cooperation agreement, but it was signed in 2021. It should be revisited and updated to reflect the changes brought by the ECA Digital to avoid conflicting obligations imposed on economic agents or duplicative enforcement.
Take the collection and processing of data as an example. An exploitative collection of data from children to feed targeted advertisements is an obvious concern under ECA Digital. Simultaneously, the control over large volumes of data is a source of competitive advantage to incumbents. Restrictions on exploitative data practices may therefore have both protective and pro-competitive effects.
Another example refers to monetization mechanisms. ECA Digital expressly prohibits the use of loot boxes in online gaming offered to children. Loot boxes are reward mechanisms that users can purchase with real money and have the potential to encourage compulsive spending. As users sink real cash into a game to build out their character, they become locked into the ecosystem of the game developer. To leave would require them to forfeit their investment of time and money. These practices are at the intersection of child protection, competition policy, and consumer protection.
However, there are reasonable concerns about the goals of promoting competition and protecting children. The ECA Digital imposes new obligations on service providers, such as age verifications. The providers will have to invest in the new features to comply with the legal requirements. One could ask whether such a burden will be heavier for smaller, disruptive platforms that lack the resources to implement the necessary features. This could lead to a scenario in which only large providers can comply with the ECA Digital, while smaller firms face significant sanctions and could ultimately be driven out of the market.
There is also the risk that sanctions imposed by the ANPD due to the infringement of ECA Digital directly affect the market structure. ANPD could determine the immediate suspension or prohibition of a service, without considering arguments on competition, but with a direct impact on market dynamics. Moreover, there is also the possibility of a provider being sanctioned under the ECA Digital and the Competition Act for the same conduct. Data profiling, for example, could be considered an abuse of dominant position and also a breach of ECA Digital.
Recognizing these overlaps and potential conflicts is essential for coherent regulation and coordinated digital governance. Brazil’s ECA Digital and proposed DFCAreflect an understanding that regulation cannot be siloed. Just as competition authorities are applying ecosystem analysis to understand how digital platforms leverage synergies between their products and services to protect their market power across different industries, so too can legislation synergistically target traditionally separate regulatory concerns. Protecting the activity of children online and tackling platform power are not separate challenges but interconnected dimensions of the same problem.
These reforms risk institutional incoherence if pursued separately. If coordinated, they offer a promising model of integrated digital governance, treating children as important participants in digital ecosystems shaped by competition, design, and power. The success of this experience will depend not only on the breadth of new regulatory powers but also on the necessary coherence in the enforcement by the agencies.
Author disclosure: The author currently serves as Chief of Staff at CADE’s Tribunal. According to the 2025 ASCOLA Transparency and Disclosure Declaration, the author declares that he has not received any funding for the present study or engaged with companies mentioned in the article, and that he has worked at a national competition authority while writing this article. No confidential information has been used in the article. The views and opinions expressed in the article are solely those of the author in his personal capacity and do not reflect official positions by CADE.
Articles represent the opinions of their writers, not necessarily those of the University of Chicago, the Booth School of Business, or its faculty.
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