Brazil’s Civil Rights Framework for the Internet (Portuguese: Marco Civil da Internet), regarded as a model of digital rights legislation and one of the most significant digital governance initiatives to emerge from the Global South, has received widespread acclaim from international internet rights advocates. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, praised Marco Civil as a landmark initiative for protecting human rights online and highlighted its ‘groundbreaking, inclusive and participatory process’. Yet how far did these institutional advances actually enable Brazil to challenge the established power relations of global internet governance? In the book Digital Rights at the Periphery: Making Brazil’s Marco Civil, Hoskins goes beyond simply tracing the legislative history of Marco Civil and examines how it was formed and has evolved through the interactions and power dynamics between the government, businesses, civil society and other stakeholders. This takes readers to a more fundamental question: can digital rights impose meaningful constraints on the structural forces of informational capitalism, or do they merely adapt to or even reinforce them through new institutional arrangements?

Rather than reducing the story of Marco Civil to a simple tale of ‘success’ or ‘failure’, the author places emphasis on the legislative process itself, asking which rights advocates were given a voice and in which issues were redefined, debated or marginalised during the negotiations. These questions arise across a range of issues, including net neutrality, platform responsibility, intellectual property, data localisation, digital sovereignty and others. These were not isolated policy disputes but points of contention among various economic and political forces concerning information, data and internet infrastructure. Therefore, Marco Civil emerges not only as an important piece of digital rights legislation but also as an illuminating example of how informational capitalism operates in Brazil, a country on the global ‘periphery’ (p.5).

To address this question, the study has developed an analytical framework for understanding informational capitalism, which is based on four dimensions: logics, dynamics, zones and discourses (p.15). Within this framework, ‘commodification (p.18–23)’ and ‘control (p.23–26)’ are identified as the two basic logics of informational capitalism. Data, knowledge and user behaviour are turned into economic resources through processes such as datafication, intellectual property, coding and information-based production. At the same time, control over data, information flows, digital infrastructure and code provides an important basis for both capital accumulation and the exercise of power. Then, drawing on core-periphery World-Systems Theory, the author views internet governance as an ‘epicentre-core-periphery’ structure (p.36) and places Brazil on the periphery of global informational capitalism. This idea of the ‘periphery’ speaks less to a lack of agency, but rather to the limitations imposed on Brazil’s digital development due to its reliance on technology, capital, infrastructure and intellectual property.

The empirical focus of the study is the formation of Marco Civil between 2009 and 2014 (p.9). Based on semi-structured interviews, critical discourse analysis and an analysis of policy and legal documents, Hoskins traces the framework’s development from its early stages, through its eventual passage, to the challenges it has faced under Bolsonaro, as well as its ongoing evolution. Hoskins’s close analysis of the bargaining among different actors shows that Marco Civil was not simply the product of digital rights ideals. It took shape through the clash and compromise of competing interests and visions of governance. The book brings this dynamic to life through several telling examples: telecommunications companies invoked ‘Venezuelanisation’ to turn technical regulatory disputes into anti-communist fears (p.112); content giants such as Globo pushed for intellectual property exceptions, while internet platforms invoked ‘innovation’, ‘openness’ and ‘neutrality’ to cast their commercial interests as serving the public good.

The discussion also brings the Brazilian Pirate Party (Portuguese: Partido Pirata) into view, a small political party that advocated for a more open and less commercial internet. This marginal actor’s claims about digital rights never made it into the final institutional framework (p.96), yet they offer a valuable lens for understanding the boundaries of Marco Civil. When the terms of debate are already fixed by libertarianism, technocracy and industry interests, being able to speak does not mean being able to shape outcomes. Which voices get heard, and which proposals become law, is itself an exercise of power. The consequences of these institutional choices also extended into the years that followed. During Bolsonaro’s time, the spread of fake news and platform-based radical political mobilisation came to the fore within the institutional landscape shaped before. The compromises embedded in the legislation did not end with its passage. In some respects, they left behind an institutional landscape in which existing forms of platform governance persisted, shaping the conditions under which new forms of political communication and mobilisation emerged.

Hoskins’s critical interpretation of the Marco Civil shows that even a widely regarded ‘success story’ in digital rights legislation can still carry structural constraints. A law can enshrine strong protections on paper while leaving the underlying commercial and political structures largely unchanged. This tension is particularly pronounced in countries from the Global South, where digital governance cannot be understood apart from domestic political conditions, stages of development and dependence on foreign technology companies. Brazil’s experience is valuable not only because it offers a legislative model that can be used as a reference but because it helps us consider what institutional conditions allow digital rights to become effective governance capacity, rather than remaining a formal commitment detached from underlying political and economic realities.

It would be fruitful to extend this framework to other countries in the Global South and examine how different institutional contexts shape the relationship between digital rights and state capacity. For readers interested in digital governance, platform power and the Global South, Digital Rights at the Periphery offers a valuable empirical study of what happens when digital rights meet the political and economic realities of governance.