Executive Summary

The 2026 RDR Index: Telco Giants Edition (TGE) marks our first research launch since RDR renewed its mission as an independent initiative. It is also the first time since 2022 (and the seventh time overall) that we’ve evaluated the world’s most prominent telecommunications companies on how well their corporate structures and policies protect users’ rights. Our focus remains clear: freedom of expression, information, and the right to privacy.

Over the years, telecom operators have consistently received less public scrutiny than the platform giants we assessed last year. Yet they are key gatekeepers of the digital ecosystem. As internet service providers (ISPs), these companies build and maintain the infrastructure that underpins the internet, transmit petabytes of data across networks, and enable everyday communication on billions of devices.

As global connectivity has expanded, so has telecommunications operators’ power over users and their rights. The efforts of telecom heavyweights to reinvent themselves amid the generative AI boom have triggered an explosion of cross-industry partnerships. From 5G to resource-intensive generative AI products, new technologies delivered through telecom services have entrenched this power.

Deregulation, ownership changes, and growing ties between corporate and state interests have defined the last few years in telecom. Multiple governments have deepened surveillance partnerships with telecommunications providers. In the United States, regulators have weakened their oversight of the industry’s baseline cybersecurity protections. US courts have functionally abolished net neutrality rules through which telecoms had been regulated as public utilities. Meanwhile, in an effort to reduce geopolitical risk and financial losses, several telcos have sold off their operations in specific countries or entire regions, introducing new potential vectors of harm.

Against this fast-changing landscape, the 2026 RDR Index: Telco Giants Edition reveals persistent gaps in how leading ISPs and network operators have responded to growing expectations around transparency, governance, and human rights protection. While several telcos headquartered outside of Europe and the United States made notable progress by strengthening transparency around their freedom of expression and privacy protections, some leading European and US-based providers showed limited improvement or even made fewer disclosures across several key areas.

• Telefónica remained the top-ranked telecommunications operator this year. However, its overall transparency level declined slightly compared with its performance in the 2022 RDR Index: Telco Giants Scorecard. This was Telefónica’s first decline in performance based on policy changes^[1] since RDR first assessed it in 2017.
• MTN and América Móvil rose to second and third place respectively, up from sixth and seventh in RDR’s 2022 ranking. This shift was driven by substantial policy improvements by both companies. For the first time since the inaugural RDR Index in 2015, two companies headquartered outside Europe or the United States ranked among the top three, a milestone for telcos outside the dominant centers of economic and political power. This points to an emerging trend of gradual convergence in transparency between “Western” incumbents and companies in other parts of the world.
• At the other end of the ranking, Ooredoo once again placed last. However, the company’s total score increased to 14 points, up from 9 in 2022, crossing into double digits for the first time. This gain was largely attributable to Ooredoo’s stronger disclosures on its corporate governance of human rights issues, particularly board- and executive-level human rights oversight mechanisms.
• The average transparency score across all 12 telecom giants was 34 out of 100 — a modest increase from 29 in 2022. Eight of these companies fell within a narrow score band of 36 to 42, suggesting a convergence around mid-level transparency across the sector.

The Good News

Bright spots in telco transparency

The telecom industry’s governance processes are slowly catching up to core human rights transparency standards. In this year’s research, four companies enhanced their disclosure of top-down governance mechanisms providing oversight of how human rights commitments are implemented in their daily operations.

Telcos increasingly positioned human rights impact assessments (HRIAs) as a core mechanism to embed and fulfill their human rights commitments across their operations. For the first time, all telecom operators we evaluated disclosed that they conduct some form of HRIA or risk assessment. And 11 out of 12 companies^[2] indicated that their due diligence processes covered users’ freedom of expression or privacy protection, though the quality and depth of these disclosures varied widely.

All companies acknowledged the use of targeted advertising in their services. With the exception of Ooredoo, all of them provided some options for their customers to opt out of personalized ads. However, they were not always clear about how users could do so. Four companies — Axiata, e&, Orange, and Vodafone — broke new ground by providing opt-out information for the first time. In addition, almost all of the telcos gave users the ability to obtain or at least access a copy of their personal information; once again, the sole exception was Ooredoo.^[3]

“Emerging markets” are closing the transparency divide

As in RDR’s 2022 assessment, nine of the 12 companies — three quarters of those we evaluated — improved their overall transparency, particularly in the lower half of the ranking. Their progress significantly boosted the increase in the average score across all telcos.

Orange recorded the largest increase, gaining nearly nine points after several years of stagnation. The French company stood out for its stronger disclosures around freedom of expression, including new policies on advertising content and targeted ads, which drove its increase in transparency. As a result, the long-standing gap between Orange and its European peers narrowed significantly.

Telcos headquartered in the Global Majority achieved substantial progress. MTN and América Móvil made the podium for the first time this year, joining top-ranked Telefónica. This marks a watershed moment: two of the three most transparent telcos now represent “emerging markets,” setting templates for transparency rather than perpetually chasing their peers. This was the second consecutive milestone for both companies, which first entered the industry’s top six in the 2022 RDR Index: Telco Giants Scorecard.

Several other telcos that had consistently lingered near the bottom in previous years also showed signs of breaking out. Axiata, Bharti Airtel, e&, and Ooredoo all made strong progress in transparency, particularly on their governance practices. Improvements included clearer disclosures on human rights oversight structures, due diligence process, and employee training. All four telecom operators improved their performance in this area by double digits. e& led the way, as reflected in a governance score increase of more than 20 points.

These gains in Africa, Asia and Latin America, may reflect broader shifts in global regulatory expectations and reporting standards across multinationals. The European Union released the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) in 2023. While CSRD is only a regional regulation and the reporting requirements have been loosened in early 2026, the Directive has served as a common benchmark for sustainability disclosures among multinationals, including telcos, across the world. CSRD emphasizes areas such as board oversight of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) issues, risk management, business ethics, and data governance — precisely those where we observed the most significant improvements.

However, progress is far from a given. Relentless industry lobbying has watered down some of the most promising and most ambitious efforts to regulate both telecom and platform giants. Many in the digital rights community have questioned the need for “simplifying” EU rules, arguing that the changes weaken the legal protections against data abuse and mass privacy violations.

The Bad News

Transparency leaders hit a ceiling

Several telcos that struggled to break through in the past have clearly found new momentum on transparency. But elsewhere, we found a landscape of paralyzed progress, mirroring a Big Tech trend we reported on last year.

Telefónica^[4], Vodafone, and AT&T, the top three performers in the 2022 RDR Index, all recorded declines in transparency. While modest, these reversals could signal a longer-term trajectory in which transparency gains reach an invisible ceiling and become difficult to sustain.

While Telefónica held on to the top spot for the fourth consecutive edition of our assessment, the transparency of its governance processes decreased for the first time since it was first evaluated in the RDR Index. Vodafone and AT&T’s two-point score declines, coupled with the rapid mobilization of their peers based in emerging markets, relegated them to 5th and 6th place this year, respectively.

Meanwhile, other European telecom operators with a strong track record of transparency, including multinational giants like Deutsche Telekom and Telenor, only made limited progress over the last four years. This raises questions about the sustainability of voluntary commitments and the potential emergence of a transparency ceiling within the current ecosystem.

Worse still, some telcos appear to be deprioritizing credible multi-stakeholder engagement on human rights. One of the most concerning manifestations of this is the withdrawal of multiple telecom giants from the Global Network Initiative (GNI), a long-standing multi-stakeholder initiative. GNI’s independent accountability mechanism has long held companies to a high standard while helping them navigate human rights challenges stemming from government pressure.

In 2024-25, two major telco members of GNI, Vodafone and MTN, exited the initiative. Although Vodafone pledged to continue implementing GNI’s principles, the move reduced external oversight of the actions both companies take to fulfill those principles. It also narrowed the space for discussion on new tech and human rights challenges in the settings where the companies operate, including several non-democratic regimes. Elsewhere, Telefónica, which left GNI in 2022, ended its partnership on human rights impact assessments with BSR, a human rights-focused consulting firm, prompting changes in its disclosures that provided the public with less detail on the scope of its due diligence.

Millions are left in the dark on shutdowns and censorship

Continuing a perennial trend, the world’s most powerful telcos demonstrated exceptionally poor transparency on how they protect users’ freedom of expression and information.

Telecom operators are the primary gatekeepers of how we experience our lives online. They control the network infrastructure that underlies connectivity, giving them the ability to block websites and restrict or entirely shut down their networks in a given region at the whim of a government. Yet despite their significant role in the online information ecosystem, telcos publish very little information on the policies, practices, and mechanisms through which they govern content.

Telecom networks can easily be used as conduits of harm. As our data reveals, nearly all operators publish at least some rules on what behavior and content they prohibit from circulating on their networks. This often encompasses spam, financial scams, harassment, impersonation, and illegal or illicit materials. Strong policies and clear consumer protections against these risks are especially important in the age of broad access to high-fidelity AI-based voice cloning tools whose use by scammers and other malicious actors has been widely documented. In the US, government estimates indicate that the victims of “AI-related scams” lost nearly 1 billion USD in 2025 alone.

Nevertheless, none^[5] of the telcos we evaluated released any data on the content or accounts they restricted to enforce their own policies, no matter if the alleged violations occurred in messages, calls, or advertising. Furthermore, although advertisements circulate freely through telecom networks, only five companies — Bharti Airtel, e&, MTN, Orange, and Telefónica — published formal ad content policies detailing what types of ads are not permitted.

Government censorship and network disruptions are another common vector of grave human rights harms for which telcos are often unwitting intermediaries.

In 2026, the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) analyzed the evolution of the internet censorship landscape in recent years. OONI’s findings revealed that network-level restrictions have become omnipresent, as the technical infrastructure and legal frameworks to enforce such restrictions are gaining traction beyond authoritarian contexts. Moreover, governments are diversifying their tactics and measures of blocking communication, increasingly experimenting with intermittent blocks of messaging apps during elections and throttling bandwidth to slow down access to online services. In this context, transparency around government demands to restrict content and accounts becomes crucial.

The results are alarming. Of the 12 telcos we assessed, only AT&T, MTN, and Telefónica published some data about the government orders they received to block IP addresses or web addresses (URLs) or restrict users’ access to their accounts. New policies in this area were rarely paired with enforcement data. Malaysia’s CelcomDigi, whose operations are overseen jointly by Axiata and Telenor, stated in 2024 that it would begin blocking all SMS messages containing URLs and personal information at the request of the Malaysian government. However, it never disclosed the volume of blocked messages.

Network shutdowns continue to pose a severe threat to human rights across the globe, particularly as governments in authoritarian or restrictive settings use them as a tool to stifle protest. By all accounts, this problem is only becoming more dire as the incidence of shutdowns reaches grim new heights. In 2025, Access Now and its partners tracked 313 shutdowns in 52 countries, surpassing the previous record high of 304 in 2024.

As network operators, telcos play a critical role in maintaining network integrity and are therefore expected to take meaningful steps to safeguard users’ freedom of expression, access to information, and right to assemble. As the most frequent recipients and implementers of shutdown orders, they should strive to meet a high bar of transparency.

However, in reality, telecommunication operators continue to fall short on this front. This year, all companies acknowledged that they may be required to comply with government-ordered shutdowns. Two thirds of them disclosed their process for handling such requests. But most shared no further details. Only three companies, namely Telefónica, Telenor, and Vodafone, committed to pushing back on government orders when they deem them to be inappropriate. Compliance rates and notification represent two other chronic transparency gaps; only MTN, Telefónica, and Telenor released relevant (but not comprehensive) statistics on the former issue, while only MTN committed to notifying users affected by a shutdown.

AI at the core, transparency at the margins

With the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence, telecommunications companies are moving to transcend their traditional role of providing network infrastructure and connectivity.

Across the sector, telcos are repositioning themselves as “ techcos,” a marketing term meant to represent a shift to digital, platform-based operations and the integration of AI-driven services into the core telecom business model. Use cases range from optimizing network performance to enhanced data analytics, more personalized ads, and deploying AI agents for customer service.

Since our last assessment, telcos have experimented with an array of AI integrations and emphatic strategic shifts. Axiata announced a strategic shift toward becoming “an AI powered TelcoTechco,” mirroring many of its peers. Telefónica and Orange both introduced proprietary AI assistants. Bharti Airtel deployed an AI tool aimed at detecting bank fraud in real time. e& implemented an “enterprise-grade agentic AI” to support compliance functions. Deutsche Telekom debuted an “ AI phone” with an integrated generative AI assistant developed by the US startup Perplexity.

RDR calls on telcos to move beyond high-level references to “ethical” or “responsible AI.” The industry should pair its enthusiasm for the technology with substantive transparency on how AI and algorithmic systems operate, how they are governed, and how companies address the risks to privacy and freedom of expression that stem from them.

Yet despite some improvement, telcos’ transparency on AI and algorithms remained exceptionally poor compared with other areas. Telefónica remained the top performer in this area but still failed to reach a score of 50.

At first glance, there is some positive momentum. Nearly all telcos published human rights commitments explicitly related to AI or at least outlined baseline AI principles. Axiata, e&, Ooredoo, and MTN all came out with their inaugural AI principles, leaving Bharti Airtel as the lone operator that has yet to take this step. Six of the 12 companies indicated that they conducted human rights impact assessments on their AI or algorithmic systems, though these disclosures were typically brief and lacked detail. Within this group, América Móvil, Axiata and e& reported on their AI-related due diligence process for the first time.

However, these improvements were largely limited to high-level declarations whose relationship with operational reality remains unclear. Companies provided limited evidence of how their commitments translated into internal oversight or operational safeguards. Only Telefónica and Telenor disclosed more detailed procedural frameworks to monitor and manage the use of AI.

Deutsche Telekom and Telefónica were the only two companies that introduced concrete policies governing the development of AI. The former launched an AI engineering policy covering safeguards that are meant to be implemented before new AI systems are designed, during their development, and after their launch. Telefónica, for its part, stated that it follows security policies and traceability requirements in its AI development efforts. AT&T also signaled the existence of a unified document and process detailing actions teams should take to ensure the AI tools they develop are “safe” and “responsible.” However, the document is not publicly accessible.

AI training is a common flashpoint for consumer advocacy. User data plays a central role in the development of algorithms and model training across the tech sector. Among the twelve companies RDR evaluated, only Bharti Airtel was forthcoming about its use of customers’ information for machine learning algorithms to “enhance services quality, prevent fraud, and provide smarter solutions.” It was also one of only two companies, alongside e&, to report on how algorithms are used to enforce policies, specifically detecting spam calls and messages as well as illegal activities. However, none of the 12 companies indicated if users could opt out of the use of their information for the development of algorithmic systems.

The long silence on ad targeting continues

Telcos worldwide are pouring enormous amounts of money into advertising. In the US, the growth in the industry’s ad spend is second only to that of financial services as of 2025. An invaluable resource underpins this: rich targeting data.

Telecom operators collect highly granular user data that puts them in an exceptionally favorable position to deliver targeted advertising. Every interaction by a customer can be used for precise audience targeting. MTN’s advertising portal captures this “telco advantage” well: “[E]very SIM card is tied to a real person, offering unparalleled accuracy in data collection. Each interaction, whether it’s a phone call, a recharge, or app usage, is recorded in real time. Telcos, therefore, have an edge in audience targeting and analysis because they gather first-party data directly from users.”

Yet even as the telecom ad business explodes, what operators reveal about how they govern it remains alarmingly limited.

This year, telcos made some progress in disclosing the fact that they use targeted advertising (see Good News section). However they still failed to provide some key information around how this targeting works and policies that define its use. Telefónica remained the only company stating that it assesses the potential impact of targeted ads on users’ freedom of expression and privacy, and only four companies rolled out a formal policy governing targeted ads.

Most telcos provided little transparency on data inference, the process of deriving new information or insights about an individual from existing data, often by analyzing behavior patterns or combining multiple data sources. Although data inference plays a central role in targeted advertising, only four companies — América Móvil, AT&T, Telefónica, and Vodafone — outlined what information they infer from data they collect, and even those disclosures were disappointingly vague. AT&T and Telefónica even reduced the granularity of this information since 2022.

Among all twelve telcos, none disclosed whether users could control or opt out of automated inference of new data about them. Only Telcel, América Móvil’s telco service in its home country of Mexico, allowed users to delete the information inferred from data associated with their profiles; its peers’ policies on this are unknown.

Conclusion

Our findings show that most of the measurable progress among the world’s telecom giants came in the form of more transparent governance, but these gains were not matched by comparable improvement in areas where users are directly exposed to human rights harm. Significant gaps persisted in telcos’ handling of government pressure, content governance, targeted advertising, and the development and deployment of AI.

As AI and other emerging technologies continue to transform the telecommunications sector, the industry’s flagbearers are assuming greater influence over how information flows and how user data is processed. At the same time, the growing alignment between network operators and government authorities in some markets has further increased the potential impact of their decisions on users’ rights. In this context, transparency becomes even more critical as the foundation for accountability, just as any ground lost can become a foundation for impunity.

Read the full 2026 RDR Index: Telco Giants Edition for more detailed analysis and company breakdowns.