Brazilian Congress passes Internet bill of rights

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Brazil's Senate unanimously approved groundbreaking legislation that guarantees equal access to the Internet and protects the privacy of Brazilian users in the wake of US spying revelations.

President Dilma Rousseff, who was the target of US espionage according to documents leaked by former National Security Agency analyst Edward Snowden, plans to sign the bill into law.

She will present it at a global conference on the future of the Internet, her office said in a blog. The legislation, dubbed Brazil's "Internet Constitution," has been hailed by experts, such as the British physicist and World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, for balancing the rights and duties of users, governments and corporations while ensuring the Internet continues to be an open and decentralized network.

To guarantee passage of the bill, Rousseff´s government had to drop a contentious provision that would have forced global Internet companies to store data on their Brazilian users on data center servers inside the country.


Brazilian Congress passes Internet bill of rights