When telecom giants leave, what happens to their users?

On the last day of December 2025, sipping his morning chai in an old apartment overlooking the winter-quiet streets of Islamabad, Muhammad Khan[1] scrolled through the news on his smartphone. One headline made him pause: Telenor had just completed the sale of its Pakistan branch to Pakistan Telecommunication Company Ltd. (PTCL), the largest telecommunications operator in the country. As a loyal customer of Telenor since 2005, he felt a twinge of nostalgia. But it’s just business, he told himself. So far, nothing seemed different: the same calling plan, the same rates, even the same brand name. His attention soon drifted to the next piece of news about New Year celebrations across the world.

What Mr. Khan didn’t realize at the moment was that, from that day on, the infrastructure and operating system carrying his voice and data would be managed according to a different set of corporate priorities and regulatory obligations, including the way the company responds to authorities’ demands to shut down access to the internet and scoop up the sensitive data of customers just like him.

According to Telenor’s 2024 Authority Request Transparency Report, Telenor Pakistan received 102 government orders to shut down internet services during the year and complied with 90 of them. The company also received 74 requests for users’ historical data, fulfilling 92% of those requests. The 2025 report would be the last to cover Pakistan; with the completion of the deal, the country would no longer be included in Telenor’s transparency reporting for 2026 onward. With a 62% stake owned by the Pakistan government, PTCL currently does not publish any kind of transparency report detailing government pressure to shut down the internet or requests for user information. There is little indication that such disclosures will be introduced in the future.

Telenor’s departure from Pakistan exemplifies a broader concern about what happens to transparency and accountability when telecom giants pass the baton. It also raises urgent questions about how corporate ownership can ultimately put communities in peril. For people like Mr. Khan, the change may appear invisible in daily life, yet their digital rights may be severely curtailed. The new stewards of those rights may be subject to less public scrutiny and provide weaker safeguards in the future.

Telenor’s journey to Asia

Pakistan is not the first Asian market that Telenor has exited. The company began its aggressive international expansion beyond Norway in the mid-1990s. It entered Bangladesh, its first Asian market, in 1996, followed by Malaysia in 1999, Thailand in 2000, Pakistan in 2004, India in 2009[2], and Myanmar in 2013, encouraged by the country’s democratization process and growing openness to outside business interests. By the end of 2015, Telenor’s six Asian branches contributed more than half of the group’s total revenues. Its global subscriber base grew by over 170 million from 2005 to 2015, surpassing over 200 million users in total, most of them in Asia.

However, the winds shifted violently as the 2020s began. The promise of growth that once drew Telenor to “emerging markets” came with higher risks and volatility. Telenor’s good years in Myanmar ended abruptly when the military seized power in a brutal coup on February 1, 2021.

From that point on, Telenor struggled to balance protecting its employees and contractors on the ground, adhering to the junta’s demands, and responding to widespread criticism by human rights activists for caving to the regime’s pressure to shut down network access and share user information with government entities. A once lucrative market quickly became a flashpoint of severe human rights harms and a reputational crisis for the Norwegian company, which long touted the strength of its human rights record.

In May 2022, Telenor completed the sale of its Myanmar operation to Lebanon’s M1 Group and its local partner, Shwe Byain Phyu. The successor company, later rebranded to ATOM Myanmar, abandoned any and all forms of transparency reporting.

Following the Myanmar crisis, Telenor moved quickly to reduce its exposure to risk in Asia and refocused on its Nordic presence. The company initiated the sale of its Pakistan unit to the state-owned PTCL in December 2023. In other Asian markets like Thailand and Malaysia, it merged its local operations with domestic telecom firms. A meeting memo of Telenor’s Human Rights Expert Forum captured the ambition behind these deals: “Moving away from high-risk, 100% owned operations toward a shared-ownership or joint-venture model… allows Telenor to remain present in these markets while reducing exposure to political instability, regulatory uncertainty, and fluctuating local conditions.”

However, the joint-venture model may only end up being a stopgap measure. In January 2026, Telenor announced plans to sell its remaining minority stake in its former operation in Thailand after a quarter of a century. This trajectory has fueled predictions that the company could eventually exit its remaining Asian holdings: Malaysia, where it already retains only partial control of a merged entity, and Bangladesh, its earliest Asian venture.

Telenor’s retreat from Asia has implications for hundreds of millions of its users across the region: Myanmar offered a stark warning: with the departure of Telenor, the military junta gained greater control over telecommunications data, with fewer independent checks on how user data could be accessed.

The great retreat

Telenor is not alone. The company's shrinking footprint reflects a broader shift across the global telecommunications industry. One after another, corporate telecom titans are divesting from their international operations and reeling in their far-flung employees.

From the 1990s to the first decade of the 21st century, large telecom operators, particularly those based in North America and Europe, entered what could be called their own Age of Discovery. As many countries privatized telecommunications sectors and globalization accelerated, a number of Western companies expanded into Asian, African and Latin American countries with large and rapidly growing populations.

In addition to Telenor, Spain’s Telefónica built a vast network of operations across Latin America through its Movistar brand. UK-based Vodafone operated in more than 30 countries at its peak. In the mid-2000s, South Africa’s MTN Group expanded from Africa into South Asia and the Middle East (Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, and Yemen) by acquiring and absorbing Dubai-based Investcom.

But the same markets that once promised rapid growth have become increasingly difficult to operate in. Rising geopolitical tensions, heavy infrastructure investment, and growing regulatory pressure have forced companies to reassess their strategies. In response, many telecom operators have begun pulling back from markets they deem to be either politically risky or financially underperforming.

In 2020, MTN announced an “ orderly exit” from the Middle East to refocus on its core African markets. In August 2021, the company ended its operations in Syria amid the ongoing civil war. Several months later, it exited Yemen, where it had operated since 2006. The sale of its Afghanistan operation was finalized in 2025, after years of instability following the U.S. military withdrawal. That same year, the company divested from its subsidiaries in Guinea-Conakry and Guinea-Bissau as part of its broader restructuring.

MTN’s plans to exit its investment in Iran were hindered by the US sanctions on the country, which prevented the company from repatriating its funds. The South African telecom currently holds a 49% stake in the preeminent Iranian operator MTN Irancell. Its story there serves as a lesson in how ownership can distort and suppress transparency. As RDR reported four years ago, MTN briefly spotlighted a sustained flood of surveillance demands by the Iranian regime in its first transparency report, only to swiftly remove it and never again disclose any data from Iran.

A similar shift is underway in Latin America too. Since 2019, Telefónica has been steadily reducing its once formidable presence across the Americas to refocus on its core markets in Europe and Brazil after returns in the region fell below the cost of capital. The process began in 2019 with the sale of its five Central American operations, from Costa Rica to El Salvador. In 2025, the Spanish telecom group accelerated asset sales across the region, including Argentina, Peru, Ecuador, Uruguay, and Colombia, rounding off its withdrawal the following year by handing off its remaining units in Chile and Mexico.

Outside Brazil, the last vestige of Telefónica’s operations in Latin America is Movistar in Venezuela—in many ways a striking reflection of MTN’s predicament in Iran. Telefónica has faced continuous criticism from the press and civil society over its role in facilitating the Maduro dictatorship’s surveillance apparatus, a controversy that may compound its pressure to leave the country. Telefónica’s plans to sell off Movistar were hampered by sanctions and the aftermath of the US military intervention in 2026, with Spanish-language media outlets hypothesizing that it could eventually fall into the hands of a local oligarch.[3]

From a business perspective, these telecommunication companies have good reasons to make these decisions. Yet the withdrawal of multinational telecom operators from high-risk or commercially challenging markets raises serious concerns regarding the protection of users’ rights. When telco giants leave, new owners inherit their infrastructures and customers; what they usually do not inherit is their standards of transparency and accountability. For users in countries affected by conflict or political instability, the departure of global telecom companies could further weaken safeguards for digital rights, particularly freedom of expression and the protection of personal data.

The things we lose in the exodus

When multinational telecom companies withdraw from a market, the impact goes beyond business operations. In some cases, their departure may weaken safeguards for digital rights and unintentionally strengthen digital authoritarianism.

In authoritarian or politically unstable countries, multinational operators often face pressure from governments to shut down networks, block content, or hand over user data en masse. While these companies often have little choice but to comply with such requests, they are typically subject to international scrutiny, transparency mandates, legal liability, coordinated advocacy, and long-term reputational risks.

Together, these constraints incentivize companies to build formal processes to handle government demands in ways that minimize human rights risks. These measures may include challenging unreasonable requests, documenting them, escalating decisions internally, notifying users when feasible, rallying support through human rights fora, and maintaining some level of transparency. When telecom conglomerates leave, those checks and balances may vanish, allowing governments greater control over digital infrastructure.

Myanmar illustrates this dilemma. Telenor and Ooredoo both decided to exit the country following the military coup in 2021. Telenor justified the decision in a statement: “it became impossible for Telenor to remain in Myanmar and adhere to international law and human rights, as well as its own values and policies. Telenor has faced increasing pressure to activate intercept technology subject to Norwegian and European sanctions, which is unacceptable for Telenor Group.”

Yet investigations and litigation continued after its departure. Activists warned that transferring control of the network to new owners, particularly those with reported ties to the junta, could increase the military’s ability to track activists and dissidents.

Those fears proved well founded. In the years following the departure of foreign telecom operators, Myanmar’s digital environment has descended further into surveillance and censorship. The country experienced 85 internet shutdowns in 2024, followed by 95 in 2025. The junta also deployed sophisticated firewalls to block VPN and encrypted messaging tools like Signal. In January 2025, the country also rolled out a controversial Cybersecurity Law, further expanding its power to censor online content and control the digital sphere while claiming greater access to users’ personal data. The nonprofit Data for Myanmar has reported that at least 1,840 people were arrested due to their online expression between February 1, 2022 to October 31, 2024.

Our research shows that Telefónica, MTN, and Telenor are among the more transparent telecom operators globally. Telefónica has placed first in RDR’s telecom benchmarking for four consecutive editions. MTN surged to second place this year; Telenor was only a few points behind.

These companies maintain relatively advanced governance and compliance systems. They make formal human rights commitments and publish transparency reports detailing a range of government requests. They operate under strong regulatory frameworks such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and vocally embrace voluntary frameworks like the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises. Compared with their peers, they are usually more transparent about how they collect and manage user data and how they enforce their content policies.

But the fate of the customers these companies leave behind when they divest from local markets is not captured in any kind of scorecard.

The case of CelcomDigi in Malaysia highlights gaps that can emerge between multinational telecom operators and some local companies when it comes to managing human rights risks and ensuring transparency.

In 2022, Malaysia’s Celcom, owned by the Axiata Group Berhad conglomerate, completed its merger with its former competitor Digi, which had been operated by Telenor. When RDR evaluated the new entity in the 2026 RDR Index, researchers found that several governance practices from Digi had been carried over to the merged company. Others, however, were not.

CelcomDigi adopted explicit commitments from Digi to respect human rights in general and freedom of expression in particular, maintained internal governance mechanisms related to digital rights, and disclosed some aspects of its human rights due diligence process. These policies reflected standards previously established within Digi under Telenor’s ownership. However, the new entity did not disclose any details or data on the handling of the government requests for content restriction or user data, like what Telenor used to cover for Malaysia.

The comparison suggests that some multinational operators may bring more established governance frameworks on digital rights than many local telecom companies in emerging markets. Without external pressures, those practices may be less likely to develop. At the very least, they should not be overlooked when a company changes hands, nor should their disappearance be allowed to occur quietly.

New owners, shadowy operators

State-backed groups have been consistent winners following big telecom exits, especially in volatile or authoritarian settings. Research has long linked state ownership of internet service providers (ISPs) with higher propensity for internet shutdowns, but its impact on transparency remains underexplored.

Telenor’s Myanmar operations, for example, were sold to M1 Group, a Beirut-based investment company, and its local partner Shwe Byain Phyu, a conglomerate with close ties to Myanmar’s military. Ooredoo Myanmar (now U9 Myanmar) similarly passed on its assets to an obscure Singapore-based entity with links to the junta; in 2025, it faced allegations of helping the regime deploy a country-wide censorship and surveillance system. MTN also sold its Afghanistan unit to M1 Group, while its subsidiary in Guinea was transferred to the government.

Many of these buyers disclose very little about their governance structures or human rights policies and have nearly no incentives to do so. M1 Group provides almost no information about its internal governance practices on its website and does not publicly outline any specific commitments related to human rights. Between repressive government conduct, weak data protection laws, and their own dependency on the state, local operators often end up with fewer resources to international arbitration, even if they wished to contest intrusive government demands.

Changes at the top often claim transparency as their victim. Among social media platforms, the collapse of Twitter (now X)’s transparency reporting under Elon Musk is the flagship example, severely affecting the company’s overall transparency in RDR’s last assessment. Yet among telco giants, the same pattern is taking hold while remaining vastly underreported.

The impact of eroding transparency can be even more pernicious when telco giants leave. Because it is more localized, it captures less attention. In every single case spotlighted in this article, the local successor company failed to maintain the transparency reporting of its predecessor, assuming such reporting existed in the first place.

This is true for Telenor, which stopped reporting data on government requests in Myanmar and Malaysia after selling the former to M1 Group and merging the latter into CelcomDigi. The company will also stop reporting data from Pakistan after 2026 following its 2025 divestment. None of the successor entities have signaled plans to continue publishing these crucial statistics.

It is true for MTN, whose exits from Afghanistan, Guinea, Syria, and Yemen came with no transparency succession plan for its 20 million subscribers across the four countries. None of the buyers have ever published a transparency report comparable to those of the multinational operator they replaced.

It is also true for Telefónica, whose sweeping withdrawal from 12 countries across Latin America has come with the quiet disappearance of data on government pressure.

Even in democratic countries, legal protections for users are often poorly developed and enforced, especially when the opposing party is a state actor. With less public reporting and weaker external scrutiny, government shutdown orders, content blocking demands, and appropriation of user information may become harder to monitor and trace. Large multinational companies sometimes have the leverage and reputational incentives to question or negotiate government demands. Local operators, by contrast, often have fewer resources and less bargaining power to resist such pressure.

Taken together, these rollbacks quietly lower the bar for transparency. But they also leave hundreds of millions of people less informed and less protected.

Conclusion

While corporations may withdraw from the markets no longer attractive, the telecommunications infrastructure they once controlled remains in place. Whoever controls the network infrastructure determines how information moves and who can access it. Big telecom divestments are thus not merely strategic business moves. They also reshape the way digital infrastructure may be used and abused, all while users’ rights to freedom of expression and privacy take a back seat.

There are no magic solutions here. But when companies exit “sensitive” markets, they should not treat their departure as a simple business decision. Each case requires a careful risk assessment, backed by public reporting on how ownership change could affect transparency, government access to networks, data protection standards, and users’ rights. During such risk assessment, telcos should consult independent experts, civil society groups and, where possible, affected user communities, to identify risks that may not be visible from a purely corporate or regulatory perspective.

When transferring assets to new owners, existing telcos should also establish clear data protection and management transition plans to safeguard user information through the ownership change. During business negotiations, they should secure commitments from buyers to honor existing protections and protocols, rather than arguing that they have little influence over the conduct of future owners. Civil society and other relevant stakeholders mentioned above should also be brought into the conversation as part of the transaction process, helping to sustain a degree of oversight and accountability after ownership changes.

Meanwhile, the incoming owners should make clear commitments to carry these safeguards forward by upholding existing data protection policies, respecting limits on data retention, continuing transparency reporting, allowing for independent audits, and providing clear channels for users to seek information or remedy.

Without sound safeguards like these, the rights of millions of users may become an unintended casualty of corporate withdrawal.