Digital Rights at the Periphery
Making Brazil's Marco Civil
The history and lessons of Brazil’s groundbreaking internet law
Cloth – $110
978-0-252-04667-4
Paper – $30
978-0-252-08877-3
eBook – $19.95
978-0-252-04799-2
Publication Date
Paperback: 07/08/2025
Cloth: 07/08/2025
Cloth: 07/08/2025
Series: The Geopolitics of Information
About the Book
Signed into law in 2014, the Marco Civil da Internet (Brazilian Civil Rights Framework for the Internet) appeared to offer pioneering legislation for a digital bill of rights that addressed issues like network neutrality and privacy. Guy T. Hoskins chronicles the Marco Civil’s development and its failure to confront the greatest concentration of power in the digital age: informational capitalism. Combining interviews with discourse and political-economic analysis, Hoskins reveals why the legislation fell short while examining the implications of its emergence in Brazil, which remains on the margins of the global system of informational capitalism. Hoskins places collectivist and public service principles at the core of any framework’s effectiveness. He also shows why we must create systems sensitive to the sociocultural and political-economic contexts that will shape digital rights and their usefulness.Compelling and contrarian, Digital Rights at the Periphery looks at communications policy and internet governance in the Global South and the lessons they provide for the rest of the world.
About the Author
Guy T. Hoskins is a postdoctoral fellow with the Global Media & Internet Concentration Project at Carleton University and a contract lecturer at Toronto Metropolitan University.Reviews
Blurbs
“Hoskins’ brilliant book brings the dramatic story of the Marco Civil da Internet to English language audiences while offering a globally relevant, penetrating analysis of the tangled politics of rights, informational capitalism, and civil society. Essential reading.”--Thomas Streeter, author of The Net Effect: Romanticism, Capitalism, and the Internet
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