The Middle Way

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By JOSÉ DIRCEU*

Amazon is the US's new bid for control of Brazilian digital assets

Let's look at the facts. All of them are public. This week, I was surprised to read in Mônica Bergamo's column in the newspaper Folha de S. Paul, a note on the meeting between Minister of Communications Juscelino Filho and a representative of the US company Amazon. In addition to being one of the leaders in the cloud data storage market and other digital services, this company is launching a constellation of low-orbit satellites, Kuiper, to compete with Starlink.

That's why he sought out the minister. He is interested in taking over the space of Starlink, which has been facing problems in Brazil since its owner, billionaire Elon Musk, decided not to comply with the decision of Minister Alexandre de Moraes, of the STF. As it did not take down the profiles of internet users who were accused of preaching against democracy and institutions such as the STF itself and its ministers, the social network X (formerly Twitter) was taken down by Anatel by order of Alexandre de Moraes, on August 29.

Why do I say that smoking a pipe makes your mouth crooked? Brazilian authorities, and especially the Minister of Communications, who has Telebras in his ministry structure, should know, after the Elon Musk episode and the Snowden case in 2013, that we cannot have the country's strategic data in the hands of foreign big techs. It was a huge mistake on the part of Jair Bolsonaro's government – ​​although one could not expect anything else from him – to open the doors of the Amazon to Starlink to sign agreements and contracts, even if symbolic, involving the Armed Forces and schools.

The chosen one

But Amazon didn’t just seek out the Minister of Communications. Over the past month, its executives have visited several heads of federal agencies seeking to get closer to these institutions for more than just commercial reasons. For one of these visits, for example, they recruited Sean Roche, a colonel and former CIA director who is currently responsible for AWS’s global National Security area – Amazon Web Services.

Last week, they sought out President Lula himself and Vice President Geraldo Alckmin. They wanted to announce billion-dollar investments in computing infrastructure that they will make in Brazil, piggybacking on announcements related to the New Brazilian Industry. They ended up not getting the space they wanted since the industrial policy includes a national strategy to stimulate the creation of data centers national authorities.

Two weeks earlier, however, colleagues from the executive branch of Amazon Web Services were present at a two-day meeting in Washington, organized by several security and intelligence agencies from US Government Departments, to discuss cybersecurity with representatives from Brazil.

In addition to civil servants from federal government agencies such as Anatel, ANPD and Itamaraty, some members of parliament who oppose the Lula government and who are members of the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Cyber ​​Defense were also present. These included Sergio Moro, Marcos Pontes, Espiridião Amin and one who is not a member of the committee, Jorge Seif. The meeting was also attended by lobbyists from other big tech companies, including Google, Cisco and Apple, but only Amazon launched some corporate harassment actions within Brazil in the following weeks.

This meeting in Washington followed a series of public statements by President Lula on digital sovereignty made at global forums. Since June, Lula has spoken about a Brazilian artificial intelligence project and the control of our data in different spaces such as an ILO event, a G7 meeting and the Mercosur Summit.

Government officials have also been clearly demonstrating that the country has a digital sovereignty strategy that unfolds on several fronts, led by projects such as the “sovereign cloud”, the PBIA, the National Data Infrastructure and the IBGE’s SIGED. Even when signing contracts with foreign companies, the managers of our state-owned digital companies are demanding that services be provided in national data centers that they control. Coincidence or not, Amazon Web Services announced last week a commercial agreement to operate its cloud services in partnership with Oracle, which signed a contract with Dataprev.

If Starlink comes out, why not let Amazon come in? Neither one nor the other. Our strategic data, the data from our public health, education and public safety services, our judiciary, our mineral wealth, our fauna and flora, our public companies, our statistical and census data are our heritage, they have to be located in the country, in data centers of public institutions.

They cannot and should not feed the databases of big techs and then be processed and transformed into products to be sold to their clients – among them, the governments of countries that do not fight for the sovereignty of their data nor invest in scientific and technological development, expanding their chain of dependence.

Space dispute

Alexandre de Moraes' action against X, which did not appoint a legal representative in the country to respond to the fines applied to the company after closing its representation in Brazil, affected Starlink, which belongs to the same owner. Its accounts were blocked to ensure payment of the fines. In response, the company threatened to stop providing the service to its customers: it has 224,5 thousand satellite broadband connections, 0,5% of the national internet connection base, according to data from Anatel.

Among its clients are the Amazon Military Command, with five contracts totaling R$239, and the Navy, with one worth R$428,3. And the Army has an ongoing bid worth R$5,1 million for low-orbit satellite antennas whose specifications could only be met by Starlink, according to a report published by Folha de S. Paul. Hughes' Oneweb would be out.

Regardless of the merits of the bidding process or the size of the contracts, which are insignificant and were used much more for personal communications between military personnel and their families and for providing services to riverside residents than for strategic services, according to the statements of those involved, these contracts should never have been signed. For the reasons I have already explained above. And there is an aggravating factor. Brazil owns a satellite. Our Armed Forces do not need foreign companies' satellites snooping on our communications.

Telebras' Geostationary Defense and Strategic Communications Satellite – SGDC, was launched in 2017, with 50 Ka-band transponders for civilian operations and five X-band transponders for military operations. Its Space Operations and Control Center – COPE, located in Brasília, received a visit from President Lula two weeks ago.

It is operated by technicians from Telebras and the Ministry of Defense. A data center Tier 4, which offers a high level of redundancy and fault tolerance. The system has another control center back up in Rio de Janeiro and with fixed antennas in five points across the country.

More than the SGDC, Brazil has a set of public institutions capable of providing complementary support to Telebras' infrastructure. I specifically mention Serpro, Dataprev and the National Education and Research Network, RNP. These four entities together have assets worth hundreds of millions of reais, which they control from the SGDC to a wide range of other data centers and digital services, not forgetting the high-speed fiber optic network that currently connects Brazilian universities.

Add to this the supercomputers of Petrobras, LNCC (Santos Dumont) and the data centers of Senai-Cimatec, in Bahia, and we have a constellation of equipment and devices ready to serve this strategic project of digital sovereignty that President Lula seems to have decided to undertake as one of his priorities until 2026.

Window of opportunity

And this is the right time. The world is currently facing a bipolar dispute between the United States and China over control of global semiconductor production, the development of models and the establishment of computing infrastructure focused on artificial intelligence, the global flow of data, the manufacturing of electronic devices and strategic inputs, the dominance of digital platforms and services, and the intellectual property of so-called advanced digital technologies.

Around these two poles, groups of countries with different alignment profiles and interests gravitate.

Having failed to develop global competitors in the digital environment, the European Union has, over the last 15 years, opted to create complex legislation to protect its citizens and its digital markets in areas such as personal data protection and privacy, digital platforms, data economy, cybersecurity and, recently, artificial intelligence. At the same time, the bloc's countries have signed bilateral agreements with nations such as China and Japan in an attempt to guarantee the flow of data. At the same time, they have tried to strengthen and specialize their companies to occupy economic niches in these digital markets.

In more strategic moves, countries such as Russia, India, Japan, South Korea and Indonesia have structured national and sovereign digital ecosystems based on the creation of regulatory conditions and development instruments that have led to the emergence of national champions in areas such as social networks, e-commerce and messaging services, among others. At the same time, these nations are investing heavily in the construction of so-called public digital infrastructures, that is, arrangements of computing capacity for processing and storing data to maintain control over the strategic assets of countries, their citizens and companies on national soil.

At the extreme fringe, countries such as Africa and South America either integrate into this new global economic order in a manner aligned with the United States or do not even have the international resources and capabilities to exercise any national protagonism. These nations are basically becoming mere exporters of current digital commodities (data) and importers of solutions developed from these inputs.

In 2023, developed countries accounted for 73% of global exports of digital goods and services. Latin America and Africa each accounted for less than 3%.

Brazil finds itself in a position sui generis in this scenario. On the one hand, we are followers of the data-based techno-export model: the country is the world's second largest user of social networks, the second largest consumer of electronic games and one of the main users of generative artificial intelligence platforms. At the same time, we have a thriving digital economy: we are the 10th largest global market for information technology services, 88% of the population has access to the internet, 91% of companies use fiber optics and internet traffic growth reached 37% in 2023.

As I have already said, what distinguishes Brazil from almost all other technologically dependent nations is the existence of an arrangement of state-owned companies and public institutions capable of sustaining a differentiated model for the articulation and maintenance of what has come to be called digital sovereignty. Brazil stating this to the world is a way of showing that there is a possible middle path. An alternative for all nations, including European ones, to escape the economic and geopolitical dependence of digital oligopolies and the governments that support and promote them.

* Jose Dirceu he was Minister of the Civil House in the first Lula government. Author, among other books, of Memoirs – Vol. 1 (Editorial generation). [https://amzn.to/3H7Ymaq]

Originally published in the newspaper Metropolis.


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