Hope you didn’t celebrate yet: Brazil’s landmark bill for Internet rights, the Marco Civil, didn’t go before a House vote Wednesday as scheduled.
Instead, it’ll be at least a few more weeks, and the vote has likely has been pushed back to mid-September or even later.
“[T]he vote was delayed to sep 19th with no official reason,” activist group Mega Não told the Daily Dot via Twitter, “as [far as] we know there wasn’t enough quorum to vote.”
It’s a disappointing setback for activists. The hard-nosed Electronic Frontier Foundation, for example, strongly supports the bill, writing in a June analysis that “the adopting of this draft would be a significant victory for the protection of Brazilians’ civil liberties on-line in almost all respects.” The EFF’s sole complaint was Article 11, which would require telecommunications providers to store some user data.
In response to the delay, Mega Não’s sister site, http://marcocivil.com.br, is petitioning people to ask their representatives to bump the vote up to August 21.
“The Chairman of the Special Committee, Mr. John Arruda, said the vote on the Civil Marco was scheduled for September 19,” the site says in Portuguese, translated via Microsoft Translator. “However, in July, he’d declared that the vote would take place on August 8, and that didn’t occur. So we need to maintain pressure until the Civil Marco is voted, preferably even in August!”
The site is only moderately popular, though. So far, about 1,600 Brazilians have signed an open letter asking Brazil’s House to support the bill.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons
