Most everyone likes the idea of privacy online, but making that privacy happen is the kind of thing that takes a lot of work and diligence, and even then still may not happen in the face of the overwhelming snooping capability that some governments can generate. Brazil, however, has taken the idea of Internet privacy just a little farther than most with the approval of new legislation that amounts to a basic bill of rights for Internet users.

Referred to as the “Internet Constitution” of Brazil, the country's president, Dilma Rousseff, is set to present this set of documents at a global conference regarding the future of the Internet as a whole. On perhaps a particularly ironic note, Rousseff was found to be a target of online spying via the United States, so this legislation would not only have an impact on her country, but on herself personally.

So far, the bill has received high praise from a host of experts including the man widely credited with the invention of the Internet, Tim Berners-Lee. Said experts note a set of points within the document itself that not only spell out the rights and duties of users, but also of corporations and governments connected with the network. All this is done while, according to reports, “ensuring the Internet continues to be an open and decentralized network. One primary stumbling block the legislation faced was a provision that required Internet companies operating worldwide to store data about Brazilian users with data centers that were actually located in Brazil. A measure added after the recent snooping conducted by the United States' National Security Agency (News - Alert) (NSA), it was dropped in favor of a declaration that said Internet companies would be subject to Brazilian law and Brazilian courts whenever incidents occurred that involved Brazilian data, no matter where the data was actually stored.

Net neutrality (News - Alert) also played a part in the legislation, as local telecom firms wanted the ability to charge higher rates for content that used more bandwidth such as video calling service Skype (News - Alert). Additionally, a kind of “safe harbor” provision was established, saying that service providers weren't liable for the content that users of said services supplied, but were still expected to meet court orders about the removal of said material when such was called for.

For the most part, Brazil's Internet Constitution, as it's been called, seems reasonable enough, and represents the kind of thing that we all might well have expected to be part and parcel of the Internet experience before all this NSA spying business came to light. While there's still some potential here for misuse and abuse, much of it appears not only workable but also quite reasonable. Some exceptions do exist; the court order provision, for example, could be used by a heavy-handed administration to silence dissent throughout the Web, and the “Brazilian data under Brazilian law” provision, so to speak, may have a chilling effect on Internet companies working with Brazilian users.

But these are worst-case scenarios being described that have a fairly low chance of actually coming to be. Still, Brazil has clearly taken a long step in favor of the rights of Internet users, and one wonders if similar provisions are being considered elsewhere.