Beyond Digital Rights: Towards a Fair Information Ecosystem?

One of the major challenges in the field of digital rights is the tendency toward segmentation and hyper-specialization in topics such as privacy, freedom of expression, net neutrality, data protection, and the regulation of AI systems.

While these areas are crucial and must be defended in the 21st century, we need a more holistic perspective to address the complex intersection of technology and society. The relationship between living beings and their environment is increasingly mediated by digital intermediation and technological affordances. This shift demands an ecological vision that considers the broader implications of digital transformation and its political economy.

We are witnessing intense datafication, platformization, and a reconfiguration of power dynamics among corporations, states, and citizens. Only through a comprehensive understanding of these shifts in our information ecosystem can we develop effective strategies for advancing social justice and democracy, which is increasingly under threat from populism and its tactical alliances with oligarchs in the tech sector.

To achieve this, we must move beyond certain outdated paradigms. The cyber-libertarian notion of the internet as an ethereal, separate space—distinct from the material world—is a persistent illusion. In reality, the internet and digital technologies depend on physical infrastructure, Earth’s resources, and human labor. It is time to abandon the conceptual repertoire of the 1990s—expressions such as “cyberspace” and “cloud computing”—and instead revive the principles established at the World Summit on the Information Society, which recognized human dignity and environmental protection as foundational to a healthier information society.

Similarly, we must reassess long-standing beliefs about deregulation and the notion that an unregulated digital economy fosters innovation, competition, and dynamism. The legal frameworks designed to support platform economies and grant them broad immunities have largely failed in their original objectives. Instead, we see increasing economic concentration, stagnation in meaningful innovation, and higher barriers to entry—particularly in AI-driven markets, where access to vast amounts of data and computing power has created insurmountable advantages for dominant players.

The prevailing narratives of “Internet Freedom” and “individual human rights online” have reached their limits, in a certain way. This recognition is why, in the digital rights field in Brazil, we are now focusing on more structural elements and on fostering a fair information ecosystem.

For the past four years, Brazil has actively debated artificial intelligence legislation and has recently approved and reviewed its national AI strategy. Both prioritize people by balancing a rights-based approach with a risk-based one. This combination inherently incorporates the environmental impact concerns of how AI—particularly its intensive water and energy consumption—disproportionately affects marginalized communities. At the same time, Brazil is geopolitically well-positioned to tackle these ecological challenges, as it not only possesses one of the world’s largest clean and renewable energy matrices but is also advancing research and innovation to further expand it.

Brazilian legislative and public policy efforts are responding to these challenges by placing human dignity, the fight against inequality, and environmental sustainability at the heart of the AI governance framework.

A fair information ecosystem also requires recognizing and protecting the rights of content creators and artists in relation to AI-generated works. Creators must be able to object to the use of their works and receive fair compensation when their intellectual property is exploited, especially in training datasets used by monopolistic AI firms to generate synthetic media. This concern has prompted some of Brazil’s most celebrated artists—such as Milton Nascimento, Marisa Monte, and Caetano Veloso—to sign an open letter to the Federal Senate advocating for the inclusion of copyright protections in AI legislation. Their call underscores the need to uphold the personality rights of the creative industry in the digital age.

In collaboration with the Coalizão Direitos na Rede, a coalition of 60 civil society organizations, we are advancing an agenda for the economic regulation of digital platforms. This agenda seeks to address issues such as data-driven mergers that stifle competition and the significant asymmetries between tech giants and smaller, sector-specific companies operating in areas like education, finance, and fraud prevention. The Brazilian government is preparing a new piece of legislation, largely inspired by Europe’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) and the Digital Services Act (DSA).

Additionally, a fair information ecosystem requires robust mechanisms for public participation in negotiations over fair data flows and effective redress for those whose rights have been violated. This is why we advocate for empowering civil society organizations to initiate collective legal actions and provide mechanisms for group-based redress. Individuals and collectives harmed by automated decision-making systems must have avenues for seeking compensation and legal redress. Data protection authorities must coexist with access to justice in courts.

From a data justice perspective, it is crucial to establish democratic processes that give communities a say in how their data is used, particularly in initiatives like Digital Public Infrastructure. This vision moves beyond the traditional model of individual consent and isolated petitions, recognizing that data justice demands community-centered deliberation and equitable governance. Communities that generate data should have a voice in determining how its value is recognized and managed in the public interest. It is time to shift from the so-called informational self-determination—primarily individualistic, based on an abstract view of the data subject as a rational economic agent—to what we have been calling informational co-deliberation. This approach emphasizes a collective effort and, ultimately, public deliberation between individuals and groups to foster more equitable value distribution and political resistance through data flows.

In a globalized world, local struggles are interconnected with international policymaking. As the Brazilian geographer and intellectual Milton Santos emphasized, these fights do not occur in isolation. The digital policy battles currently unfolding in Brazil—such as securing AI legislation centered on labor and sustainability, enacting economic regulations for large platforms, and developing digital public infrastructure projects grounded in data justice—have broader geopolitical implications. These initiatives can contribute to international discussions, including the G20 processes in South Africa and the formulation of global cooperation strategies.

Adopting the framework of a fair informational ecosystem might offer an opportunity for citizens, activists, industry and policymakers to expand their analytical perspectives, beyond the traditional digital rights approach of the beginning of the century. At the very least, this is the approach we have been pursuing in Brazil and in our dialogues with civil society organizations from the Global South.

This article was originally published on Tech Policy.