Efforts for Counterbalancing Platform Power Through Regulation: Online News Bills and Platform Dependency Disentanglement Lawmaking Initiatives in Brazil Between 2019 and 2025

This article analyzes counterbalancing platform power in online news as a collective regulatory and political effort—driven by publishers, unions, civil society, and lawmakers—to restructure the terms of the platform-publisher relationship through formal lawmaking and legislative initiatives. We examine the Brazilian case through a qualitative policy analysis of three prominent bills, proposed between 2019 and 2021 and discussed in the National Parliament between 2019 and 2025: Bills 2,370/2019, 1,354/2021, and 2,630/2020. Using frameworks from platform studies, policymaking theory, and Latin American media policy scholarship, we trace how platforms, publishers, and other stakeholders engage in strategic action to shape legal outcomes. Our findings reveal that Brazilian publishers have increasingly turned to institutional mechanisms to counterbalance platform power, while digital platforms have intensified lobbying efforts to preserve a deregulatory status quo. Although these regulatory efforts mirror international trends, the Brazilian case is shaped by longstanding political, media, and economic asymmetries. In highlighting these efforts and the conditions of their making, this article shows how economic and political actors try to counterbalance platform power towarda more balanced distribution of online news revenues. It also contributes to the growing body of literature on platform governance that extends empirical and theoretical discussions to the Global South.