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.

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Acknowledgments

Introduction: Making the Marco Civil

Understanding Informational Capitalism: Logics, Dynamics, Zones, and Discourses

Circumscription: The Discursive Delimitation of Digital Rights

Contestation: Power Plays and Debate Pollution

Cataclysm: Surveillance, Sovereignty, and Snowden at the Periphery

Legacy: The Fragile Contingency of Digital Rights

Conclusion

Appendix

Notes

References

Index

|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.