Telcos hang up on multistakeholder accountability to facilitate government demands

Telecommunications companies own, operate, and control infrastructure that forms the bedrock of modern communication. Cell towers, fiber networks, satellite systems, and network exchange points are all parts of their connective tissue. As Internet Service Providers (ISPs), telcos control the flow of information and network traffic, defining how we experience the internet.

As gatekeepers, telecom operators are exceptionally vulnerable to influence and pressure from governments. Their services are regularly used as conduits for state-directed digital repression, ranging from IP blocking, and sophisticated filtering systems to full network shutdowns.

The breadth, scale, and entrenchment of these restrictions create enormous human rights risks far beyond their impact on freedom of expression and information. Transnational government pressure frays the fabric of the civic space, as illustrated by the last-minute cancellation of a flagship human rights conference.

Telecom giants should be confronting this precarious reality with concerted efforts to increase transparency towards the people who rely on their services. Yet the vast majority fall dangerously short, perpetuating a years-long pattern of stagnation even as digital repression runs rampant.

The continued rise of network shutdowns

Since 2016, Access Now and the #KeepItOn coalition have been tracking network shutdowns around the world. Government actors are responsible for the overwhelming majority of these disruptions.

Shutdowns have diversified over the past decade into a full arsenal of digital repression. In one context, the internet connection might be throttled in a given area, with only a few websites left accessible; elsewhere, a complete blackout would block all internet access within a country or region. During the 2024 election super-cycle, Access Now recorded more than 296 network shutdowns across 54 countries. Even as the wave of elections subsided, 2025 saw a record high of 313 shutdowns, indicating their normalization as a tool to preempt and stifle dissent.

Telecom operators are almost always the entities charged with executing shutdown orders. For the second time in a row, all 12 companies we assessed disclosed some information about how they respond to these demands. However, the data they publish continues to be woefully insufficient. In fact, despite some progress on the margins, telecom giants’ overall transparency on network shutdowns is worse than it was four years ago.

Our data shows that only three companies — MTN, Telefónica, and Telenor — disclosed the number of network shutdown demands they received. Only the first two were clear about the specific legal authorities that issued those demands. América Móvil, which spearheaded a surge in transparency on handling government demands this year, tempered its own progress between 2024 and 2025 by releasing less information about the specific legal authorities that issued network shutdown orders. This makes it difficult for citizens and civil society organizations to understand who is making the call to throttle their connection and put their human rights on the line.

The widespread, chaotic impacts of network shutdowns make them an important flashpoint for advocacy. But they can obscure other risks that stem from proximity between powerful corporate actors and the governments whose license they depend on. State ownership or structural influence, extensive lobbying, and blurry boundaries as evidenced by a lack of human rights commitments can turn telecom operators into facilitators of coercive government demands.

Close relationships with governments leave people in the dark

Establishing a national foothold as a telco requires significant economic and political investment. Infrastructure such as telecommunications towers and fiber networks require large financial investments and strong political backing in order to secure access to the market – and to the customers who pay to access the internet. In addition to infrastructure, telcos often have employees on the ground in countries where they have a formal presence, supporting customers, maintaining infrastructure, and managing relationships with regulators.

In conversation with civil society and the public, telcos often point to this physical and human investment as a source of both pride and fear underlying their relationship with governments. Companies argue that they are coerced into complying with government requests to censor accounts or block access to the internet because failure to do so would put their employees or infrastructure at risk. Governments, in turn, have repeatedly shifted accountability to ISPs, using informal channels to compel operators to disrupt their own services and falsely attributing these blackouts to technical problems.

While local censorship of social media platforms receives far more coverage, governments can also demand that telcos restrict content or specific accounts. Efforts by public agencies to obtain detailed data on telecom customers and their communications are a parallel and highly entrenched phenomenon.

Close relations and dependencies between corporate and state actors blur the lines between companies acting of their own accord and being compelled to act by a higher power. For telcos, they also risk creating layers of opacity where decisions to suppress platforms or networks cannot be traced back to any formal authority.

In 2025, Qatar’s dominant carrier Ooredoo, which is majority-owned by the government, implemented an unpublished government directive banning popular gaming platform Roblox amid child safety concerns. The ban was part of a series of similar restrictions across West Asia. The lack of any formal regulatory or company-level justification for the ban created a familiar information vacuum. A block with hazy legal grounding that cannot be attributed to any single entity creates no space for remedy, recourse, and ultimately, accountability. It simply remains in place indefinitely.

The existence of legal accountability mechanisms makes a difference. Earlier this year, Telenor, whose majority shareholder is the government of Norway, admitted in response to legal action that it had complied with demands from Myanmar’s military junta to provide call logs and location data of suspected political opponents after the 2021 coup in the country. Activists claimed these handovers ultimately led to multiple arrests and executions. By contrast, when allegations surfaced that a Myanmar-based ISP operating under the new regime had procured censorship and surveillance tech, there were no legal channels left to corroborate the reporting or counter the company’s denials.

Norway’s legal system created the opportunity for civil society and the government to activate human rights mechanisms, which helped uncover what happened in Myanmar and hold Telenor’s leadership to account for the impact of the company’s hasty withdrawal from Myanmar. In Qatar, and in Myanmar today, few avenues for accountability are available. Informal, untraceable pressure is a common and powerful tool in the authoritarian toolbox, yet not a single telco we assessed reported on any government censorship demands they received through such channels. This lack of transparency means that it is impossible to know what conversations might be taking place off the books and what the consequences might be.

Large telcos are far more forthcoming about their process for handling government demands than they are about the nature of those demands, perpetuating a long-standing trend. Perhaps the most striking example this year is América Móvil, which surged to the top of the scoreboard on process transparency but published nothing at all on how many government censorship requests it received. Our data shows that only AT&T, MTN, Telefónica, and Telenor publish the number of content restriction demands made by legal authorities. Even those disclosures are fragmented, often aggregating various types of requests or missing compliance rates.

Five companies committed to push back on government demands that they deem inappropriate or overbroad, namely América Móvil, MTN, Telefónica, Telenor, and Vodafone. Despite these commitments, some operators have been implicated in facilitating governments’ desire for control to the detriment of their citizens. Telcos argue that local laws compel them to act on government demands. However, that does not explain the lack of transparency around who issued the order, how it was processed, and whether users were notified.

An illustrative example is UK-based Vodafone, which holds a majority stake in Vodacom, a South African subsidiary. Vodacom has close ties to the family of Joseph Kabila, the former president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, whose efforts to seek a third term led to a constitutional crisis and brutal crackdowns on protests. Although Vodacom was implicated, it appears to have no dedicated transparency report and does not detail the relevant government demands at a country level. Its parent company, too, lacks transparency on who issues these requests, how they are processed, and whether users are notified.

Telcos are less reluctant to share information about government demands for user data. Regulators and law enforcement agencies use a panoply of methods to obtain customers’ location and usage data, intercept phone calls, and conduct real-time surveillance of communication flows. Half of the companies we assessed report these requests every year. AT&T’s reporting continues to set a high bar for others to meet. América Móvil also published statistics on data demands in its 2025 transparency report.

But transparency scores can be misleading when decontextualized. While MTN came in second overall this year, the company has consistently left out data about government surveillance demands handled by MTN Irancell, its subsidiary in Iran. This omission is particularly glaring in light of Iran’s brutal suppression of protests and a prolonged internet blackout in 2026.[1] In Syria and Sudan, where the company has also maintained a presence, government demands have similarly been linked to political turmoil and the deaths of protestors, with little accountability.[2]

Compounding the problem, opaque data-sharing arrangements with state actors can defy traditional processes. This year, MTN once again received a near-perfect score on the transparency of its process for handling government data demands. But in the Republic of the Congo, the General Directorate of Presidential Security leveraged MTN’s official messaging service to solicit information about suspected gang members. It is unclear what user data is shared with authorities under these campaigns, as several digital rights groups pointed out in a 2025 open letter to MTN.

Open letters, transparency research, direct engagement with telcos, investor pressure, and strategic litigation can all prove effective levers in specific circumstances. But as telcos pull out of multistakeholder dialogue on human rights issues, the options for engagement are shrinking.

Missed calls? Telcos give civil society the silent treatment

Multistakeholder dialogue gives telcos a chance to open themselves up to discussions with civil society organizations and other companies. This can facilitate learning and strengthen their accountability to their own customers as well as the trust that comes with it. But too many telecom giants are choosing to leave these spaces. At a time of growing authoritarianism and exclusionary political dynamics, stepping away from diverse accountability forums drastically reduces external oversight, jeopardizes transparency, and ultimately leaves people less protected.

Most of the telcos in the RDR Index are not members of a multistakeholder initiative that enables engagement with civil society and enforces accountability through independent review mechanisms. The prime example of such a structure is the Global Network Initiative (GNI). A multistakeholder collective comprising companies, civil society, academics, and investors. GNI’s pursuit of high standards on government demands has made it a household name in the digital rights community. Companies have long used the initiative’s assessment process, rapid-response calls, and other mechanisms to share sensitive information with members of the digital rights community that they deem too risky to disclose publicly.

As of our last assessment in 2022, four operators – MTN, Orange, Telenor, and Vodafone – were members of GNI. Today, only Orange and Telenor maintain active membership. The industry’s relationship with GNI is as long as it is critical. Several major telcos joined in 2017 when the Telecommunications Industry Dialogue integrated with GNI based on a shared goal of exploring how the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights could be applied to the telecom sector. Exiting these spaces weakens not just civil society’s ability to engage with telecom giants on human rights issues, but also their own capacity to resist censorship, surveillance, and coercion by government actors.

The retreat of several telecom giants from multistakeholder spaces should serve as a warning sign for the digital rights community. While it has not yet become a full-blown trend, it could easily become a catalyst for broader retrenchment. It signals a need for civil society to rethink how it engages with tech companies that are closing lines of collective dialogue.

However, these shifts also represent an opportunity for new telcos to show they take transparency and accountability seriously. Joining initiatives such as GNI conveys this intent clearly. Further, civil society groups can use these spaces to collaborate on research and advocacy in order to create effective pressure and make the most of conversations with companies.

Building a community of mutual support in an era of runaway corporate power, democratic backsliding, and drastic funding cuts requires all of us to go beyond relying solely on our own work. Solidarity and collective power are a core strength of the digital rights community. The communal response to every suppression of the civic space is strong evidence of this.

Our collaborative vigor, along with sincere efforts by “champions on the inside,” provide the answer to the enduring question: How can the digital rights community speak up so that tech and telco giants listen?