Photo via MidJourney
Despite Central Asia’s political turmoil and fragile democratic institutions, its digital services sector has grown steadily in recent years, a trend accelerated during the recent Covid-19 pandemic. With countries across the region continuing to introduce programs focused on digitization—from work-from-home schemes to e-shops and e-pharmacies—the time was ripe to establish the region’s first baseline for corporate accountability of the growing tech sector. Tracking the way new digital products and services are affecting existing power dynamics between individuals, companies, and government bodies in this region has become more important than ever.
As we’ve noted in the past, government-imposed shutdowns and censorship are some of the most nefarious ways that the ICT sector is deployed by governments to negate user rights. This has happened, in recent years, across this region. For example, in January 2022, protests broke out in Kazakhstan due to rising gas prices. Protestors, who the government accused of attempting a coup, were met with violent repression from law enforcement authorities and armed groups, resulting in over 200 deaths. Access to the internet was also quickly restricted, as the latest Freedom on the Net report recently detailed. This was not the first time that such measures had been taken by the Kazakh government, as mobile internet access had previously been shut down during smaller, local protests in 2020 and 2021.
A similar tendency toward restricting freedom of expression online has also been well-documented in Uzbekistan, where social media platforms and messaging apps were blocked in both July and November 2021 with the introduction of the amended Law on Personal Data, which introduced data localization requirements for online services. Certain platforms were deemed non-compliant and were blocked, including Twitter and TikTok. Meanwhile, in Kyrgyzstan, the law on Protection from False Information, passed in July 2021, granted power to a government body to demand that websites and social media platforms delete content within 24 hours.
These are just a handful of examples that illustrate how autocratic-leaning governments in the region are creating new challenges to freedom online that call for the explicit safeguarding of users’ rights.
Adapting the RDR Methodology to Central Asia
It is within this context that the Public Fund Civil Internet Policy Initiative (CIPI) chose to carry out research and publish their new report, “Ranking Digital Rights in Central Asia,” using the RDR Corporate Accountability methodology. The report looks at how and whether technology companies in Central Asia have committed to respecting human rights and protecting their users.
We partnered with CIPI to guide them through the process of adapting our methodology to carry out this important new research. Although previous adaptations have been carried out in neighboring countries, such as Russia, this project marked the first time that the methodology was used to evaluate companies in Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan.
CIPI focused on three key sectors: telecommunications, e-commerce, and financial technologies (fintechs). They evaluated a total of 16 companies. In each country, these included the two most popular telecom providers, as well as one e-commerce platform and one fintech. This list also includes a mix of fully local services and larger subsidiaries of international companies. This allowed CIPI to compare whether subsidiaries or local companies were more responsive to human rights concerns. For example, CIPI evaluated three subsidiaries of Beeline, owned by VEON, a Dutch connectivity operator. In the e-commerce sector, they included two subsidiaries of OLX Group, owned by Prosus, also based in the Netherlands.
CIPI used a selection of 22 indicators from our methodology, including some covering each one of our areas of focus: governance, freedom of expression, and privacy. Their findings show clear gaps with regards to companies’ disclosures across the board. However, we’ll spotlight two areas of particular concern. Firstly, as network shutdowns continue to present an imminent threat to human rights across Central Asia, companies need to improve their transparency on policies regarding how they respond to such demands and how it affects their users. Secondly, the report highlights the disparity between the human rights commitments large parent companies provide to their users at home (oftentimes in Western Europe) compared to those provided by their subsidiaries in the regions; this is a gap that needs to be bridged.
From Shutdowns to Subsidiaries: Tracking Telcos’ Biggest Human Rights Gaps
As detailed above, the region is no stranger to government-imposed network disruptions, and all the companies evaluated have a track record of filtering websites or even shutting down access entirely in response to government demands.
Despite this fact, CIPI found that none of the telecom companies they evaluated disclosed their processes for responding to government demands to restrict or shut down access to the internet. Users are seldom informed about these shutdowns before they take place. When they are notified, it’s mostly retroactively and indirectly, via social media posts and the company’s website.
For example, when the internet was disrupted during the previously-mentioned protests in Kazakhstan, Beeline Kazakhstan posted a brief apology in the news section of their site, referring to circumstances beyond their control and offering financial compensation. In Tajikistan, following an internet shutdown that took place during a period stretching from November 2021 to March 2022, amidst political tensions, Tcell, a mobile company owned by the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development, posted a brief note on their website attributing the suspension of services to weather conditions. According to CIPI’s report, similar explanations for disruptions have been employed by telcos in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan as well.
Post-COVID uptake of digital services has been particularly notable for the region’s nascent e-commerce sector. E-commerce remains a young, albeit growing, market in Central Asia, and one that has garnered a great deal of interest from international development agencies and institutions. Uzbekistan and Tajikistan have both introduced specialized programs to foster the development of the sector.
CIPI evaluated two subsidiaries of OLX Group— an online marketplace, where people can buy and sell cars, find housing and jobs, as well as buy and sell household goods—in both Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. At the parent level, though the company doesn’t directly mention freedom of expression, it has clear human rights policies and commitments in place, and even references the UN Guiding Principles. However, the local websites of OLX Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan fail to uphold these same commitments.
The two other local e-commerce platforms evaluated, Lalafo in Kyrgyzstan and Somon.tj in Tajikistan, appear, on the other hand, to have no company-wide human rights policy whatsoever. The OLX subsidiaries performed better in disclosing their data protection practices, including how data is collected, how it’s shared and with whom, and how the company explains the purposes behind the data processing.
CIPI’s report urges all 16 companies to take concrete steps to publish clear and strong commitments to respect human rights and to enhance transparency relating to their oversight mechanisms and corporate structures. They could achieve this, among other ways, by publishing annual transparency reports. CIPI also calls on subsidiaries of large international companies to adopt their parent company’s best practices at the local level, including codes of corporate ethics.
Among the three industries that CIPI focused on, though e-commerce companies showed glaring gaps in human rights policies, this young and dynamic market showed the greatest interest in open communication with CIPI to discuss how they can best improve their policies and deepen their collaboration with civil society. The report’s authors hope that larger companies may eventually follow their lead. Ideally, these comparisons can spark further competition toward stronger human rights safeguards, and companies that follow internationally-recognized good practices will eventually lead the industry.
We invite you to read CIPI’s report in full, where you’ll find detailed explanations of the findings for each indicator and company. If you’re interested in adapting the RDR Corporate Accountability methodology and designing your own research project, you will find all the necessary information in our Research Lab, our free and open hub for the guidance and tutorials you need to launch your own RDR-style research project. If you’re interested in collaborating with us directly, or have any further questions, you can get in touch with us directly at partnerships@rankingdigitalrights.org.
