Economics, geopolitics, electronic communications and digital sovereignty.

We are living through times of rapid transitions in economic, social, and political behaviors, with global impacts on the world economy based on the trade of tangible goods, which are gradually giving way to an economy of intangible goods. 

Digital platforms and their applications are rapidly replacing old methods of exchanging goods and services with an economy that stems from accelerated cognitive exchanges, and they disseminate new knowledge that citizens around the world access, create, produce, reproduce, and make available without any geopolitical barriers or national sovereignties.

The new global commerce creates and opens up new opportunities that transcend geographical boundaries, replacing them with digital borders marked by the empire of global platforms that generate and make everything accessible, wherever human intelligence may be.

When we bring these changes into our daily lives, for example, we see social networks, content platforms, and their transnational applications that transcend barriers of language, customs, and cultures, challenging outdated control models imposed by old models of nation-states, creating new rights, and allowing people to have immediate contact with the most varied and profound perceptions for addressing and resolving the same problem or challenge from diverse perspectives.

In this context, we can observe that with the advent of global platforms, products, services, and content are acquired at impressive speeds. For example, in China, they are delivered as fast as, or even faster than, buying a product from a community in Oiapoque, Brazil.

The example may seem simplistic, but it addresses the challenges Brazil faces in developing an education for entrepreneurship in the digital world. This issue involves not only having electronic information highways which, if well-articulated by logistics for delivering new products, will promote access to and contact with new and transformative intelligences, where information, knowledge, technologies, and innovations will flow, generated by the endless opportunities that instant business interactions will create. 

All this immediacy will cause changes in the current ways of generating employment and income. These fast and creative electronic communications between Brazilians and transnational actors will give rise to unpredictable solutions to hunger, disease, and the migration of peoples, issues that affect the contemporary world.

Structuring a National Ministry of Electronic Communications is not only a challenge to address changes in the global geopolitics of trade. It is also about focusing on shaping a new national sovereignty, arising from the electronic borders established by platforms and their applications. 

In this new design, another major challenge is to highlight a concentrated effort in the reindustrialization of our country. The share of industry in Brazil's GDP fell from 48% in 1985 to just over 20% in 2021.

Industry is the engine that drives other sectors of the economy and leads us to innovation and technological development. It is imperative that every effort be made to promote industrial policies in the semiconductor sector so that we can achieve digital sovereignty within a few years and gain an advantage over Asian competition in this sector.

The Chinese government has, in recent years, never stopped promoting its domestic semiconductor industry, which includes the design, manufacturing, and packaging of chips.

We must now plan how to defend the interests of our people in the face of technological advances in global industry and e-commerce and their impacts on the lives of all Brazilians.

To equip Brazil with a network infrastructure, that is, to build the great information highways that will allow the flow of information and knowledge structures of our people. This is perhaps the greatest challenge, even greater than the one perceived by JK when he interconnected Brazil through major highways that allowed Brazilians to boost the trade of national products and technologies both domestically and beyond their borders. 

Clemilton Saraiva, Specialist in Telecommunications Services Regulation, graduated from INATEL.