IGF 2023 Town Hall #142 Lost in Translation: Brussels Effect and platform regulation

The European Union's Digital Services Act (DSA) has attracted worldwide attention even before being fully implemented and is already perceived as a staple of platform regulation in other regions of the globe. However, some of its structural features – including the “duty of care” and the “notification of illicit content” – may not necessarily travel well or are likely to require some degree of adaptation by other jurisdictions, especially in the Global South.
To better illustrate this challenge, the present Town Hall session will take as a starting point the Brazilian draft bill on Internet freedom, accountability and transparency (Projeto de Lei nº 2.630/2020) and debate the challenges that the “Brussels Effect” of the DSA may bring. The bill gained momentum after the invasion of Brasília on January 8th of 2023 and was reformulated to reflect some of DSA's core elements. An analysis by ITS Rio concluded that as much as 44% of the bill was changed in the couple of weeks leading into Congress' decision to mark the draft as urgent, accelerating the legislative process.
In order to grapple with the challenges raised by this phenomenon, the organizers will bring together specialists in Internet regulation and governance from Europe, India and Brazil to discuss the influence and potential impacts of DSA's provisions across the Global South from the perspective of the so-called Brussels Effect.
The main objective of this 2023 IGF Town Hall session is to spark a necessary conversation and raise awareness to how much may be lost in translation throughout this process, creating undesired pressure points for platform regulation in the Global South. To make the most of this collaborative experience, the discussion will focus on three pillars: (1) the platforms' duty of care and risk assessment in content moderation systems; (2) the creation of a specific and autonomous administrative entity to monitor and implement the regulatory framework; and (3) the notification of potentially illicit content by users (notice and action).

Building on our experience hosting a hybrid IGF Town Hall session in the last years (2021 and 2022) and given that this format is intended to be interactive and promote engagement around Internet governance topics and even controversial issues, we propose a two-part structure. First, speakers will share their insights and opinions on platform regulation and how this debate outside the European Union may be impacted by the Brussels Effect, with a focus on the Global South. This will set the stage for our second phase, when attendees will be asked to voice their thoughts and impressions on how the DSA may or may not translate into platform regulation strategies for the Global South, focusing on the three pillars described above.
To guarantee broad participation of the public, we will also use participatory tools such as Jamboard and Miro, where attendees will be able to share their thoughts and ideas and the online moderator will compile them “on the go” during the session. The moderators will also lay out ground rules for on-site and remote interaction through video/voice in order to ensure equal time of participation as well as diversity of participants. The interaction between speakers will be previously agreed upon in a pre-session meeting hosted by the organizers named above. Moreover, the moderators will also consider the possibility of conducting live polls among the participants to have a better understanding of how the public is reacting to different ideas and suggestions that may emerge throughout the session.