CADE, telephony, and national security.
Doing anything to diminish the power of foreign companies that control the Brazilian telecommunications and broadband market is of fundamental importance for national security.
Brazil's Administrative Council for Economic Defense (CADE) has finally ruled that Telefónica SA of Spain must divest its direct and indirect stake in TIM Participações, or find a new partner for Vivo in Brazil.
In September, Telefónica increased its stake in TELCO, a holding company that owns a significant portion of Telecom Italia (owner of TIM), through a transaction in Europe.
At the time, the President of the Spanish Group, Cesar Alierta, met with President Dilma, who was in New York to participate in the United Nations General Assembly, to discuss the matter.
Even because it is complying with the law, CADE (and ANATEL) must stand firm regarding this decision, because it is not only about protecting competitive conditions - focusing on respect for consumer rights - but also a matter of significant strategic importance for the country.
Just yesterday, The Washington Post revealed in the United States that the NSA, the American spy agency, monitors the connections between billions of cell phones in various countries around the world – outside of the United States – daily, cataloging their location and who is communicating with whom.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, confirmed that the United Nations was also spied on, and that documents belonging to the Secretary-General himself, Ban Ki-moon, were leaked.
According to Pillay, the espionage is jeopardizing not only the work of the UN, but also the lives of people who – in the area of human rights – report crimes to the organization.
British journalist Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden's partner in leaking the NSA documents, told the French magazine Telerama this week that new information to be released by the former NSA spy in the coming days would "shock the world."
And on Tuesday, the editor of the British newspaper The Guardian, where Greenwald works, Alan Rusbridger, said during testimony to the Home Affairs Committee of the British Parliament that "only 1% of the total information in Snowden's possession has been released so far."
In this context, considering that we have already handed over even our satellites to multinational corporations during the privatization of the Telebras System in the 1990s, anything that can be done to diminish the power of foreign companies that control the Brazilian telephony and broadband market is of fundamental importance for national security.
Spain (and the Rajoy government) acts as a traditional and subservient ally of the United States in the international context. As Julian Assange, the one who released the Wikileaks documents, said regarding our continent: “mass surveillance is not just a problem for governance and democracy – it’s a geopolitical issue. The old powers will exploit any possibility to delay or suppress the outbreak of Latin American independence.”
* This is an opinion article, the responsibility of the author, and does not reflect the opinion of Brasil 247.