Transparency improves on shutdowns, but telcos still weak on free expression

By Jan Rydzak

In a first for our ranking, all 12 telcos published something about how they respond to network shutdowns. But their reporting on freedom of expression issues continued to lack critical detail, translating into scant transparency in this area.

For most people, telecommunication companies provide the essential infrastructure for accessing the internet. This gives telcos immense power: They are responsible for tracking information flows and managing network traffic. But they can also serve as enablers of far-reaching abuse by other powerful actors, yielding to expression-chilling government surveillance, executing government-ordered communication blackouts, and blocking services and websites.

New transparency reports from Mexico’s América Móvil and South African MTN offered fresh insight into their processes for handling demands for censorship and network shutdowns, but data on these demands remained incomplete.

As in previous years, telcos’ performance in the freedom of expression category was far poorer than in the governance and privacy categories, though they did show improvement compared to their rankings in the 2020 RDR Index. New transparency reports from Mexico’s América Móvil and South African MTN offered fresh insight into their processes for handling censorship demands and network shutdowns, but the data on these demands remained incomplete. By contrast, none of the telcos made any advancements in transparency on how they enforced their own policies, such as detailing the behavior that triggers account suspensions and how prevalent those suspensions were. This was one of only two areas in this year’s Telco Giants Scorecard where we recorded an overall score decline.

Network shutdowns are among the most severe manifestations of how governments weaponize telcos to curtail free expression. Sweeping and indiscriminate, they cut off access to communication for entire neighborhoods, cities, regions, and countries. They generate severe knock-on effects, especially among historically marginalized groups. In short, they illustrate that when companies take actions that violate freedom of expression, they risk generating a chain reaction that can lead to violations of other human rights.

Despite vigorous resistance from civil society and major recent UN reports, these disruptions remain one of the favorite tools in the authoritarian toolbox. In 2021 alone, Access Now and the #KeepItOn coalition documented 182 shutdowns across 34 countries. The Ethiopian region of Tigray has been disconnected from nearly all digital communication for two years. And 2021 saw the first deliberate blackouts in Burkina Faso, Eswatini, Niger, Palestine, Senegal, South Sudan, and Zambia, with more than 20 countries blocking one or several communication platforms.

Our data shows that only three companies have made progress on their transparency regarding such orders in the last two years: América Móvil, MTN, and Orange. The first two published the first transparency reports we’ve seen from any telco in Latin America and Africa, respectively. Meanwhile, Telenor—embroiled in a rocky exit from Myanmar that has left its former customers in jeopardy of losing their data to the country’s junta—ceased naming the authorities with the power to issue shutdown orders in its operating markets. Despite its otherwise above-average performance and a strong transparency reporting record, it was the only company to actually weaken its disclosures on this topic. Telenor’s stalled progress in other areas caused it to slip down one spot in both the freedom of expression category and in our overall ranking.

Nonetheless, this Scorecard marks the first time that all 12 telcos we evaluate have publishedsomethingabout how they respond to shutdowns. In its inaugural transparency report, América Móvil shared some information about the legal basis for such disruptions and its process for handling them. But the Mexican network operator remained silent on how many orders of this kind it had received or complied with. The report also never mentions that A1 Telekom, América Móvil’s subsidiary in Europe, capitulated to a cascade of shutdown orders issued by the government of Belarus in 2020, and has stonewalled civil society organizations that have tried to hold the company accountable ever since.

Telcos’ duty to protect free expression goes beyond shutdowns. We still know very little about how telco giants process demands from government and private actors to block access to individual IPs and URLs, suspend accounts (for instance, by disabling individual SIM cards), or impose other restrictions. This year, MTN joined three other companies already reporting some of this data (AT&T, Telefónica, and Telenor), but none of their peers have followed suit.

Similarly, telcos are stagnating and sometimes even regressing in how much they report on their own policy enforcement. Since the inaugural RDR Index in 2015, every telco has published at least basic rules about what behavior it prohibits, often including spam and harassment. But this year, two top performers—AT&T and Telefónica—added open-ended language that blurs users’ understanding of what they are not allowed to do. Once again, not a single telco reported any data on how it enforced these rules.

Combined with weak industry-level disclosures in other areas, this year’s results clearly show that freedom of expression remains an enormous blind spot for telcos—one that powerful actors will eagerly exploit.