Why telecom firms should care more about human rights

Sophia Crabbe-Field is a senior editor at Ranking Digital Rights.

Big Tech companies like Meta, Amazon, and Twitter dominate our headlines, but telcos actually wield more power. While Facebook’s impacts on the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar are well documented, two other powerful tech companies were also deeply entrenched in the country’s political affairs: international telecom operators Ooredoo and Telenor. As the country returned to military rule after a 2021 coup, both companies reported being asked to spy on citizens and shut down the internet. They exited the market in 2022, but not before embroiling themselves in further controversy, over the fate of their users’ data and the safety of their employees.

To people in many democratic countries, telcos may seem like the benign infrastructure needed to access the social media sites upon which the real battles over our information systems are being waged. This is not the case in places across the globe where respect for, and protection of, human rights is lacking. Telcos are often compelled, under authoritarian and authoritarian-leaning regimes, to carry out everything from surveillance to communication blackouts, and the blocking of key services and websites.

Telcos operate under a difficult set of circumstances: They can only provide their services under government contract and must adhere to licensing restrictions, which makes them susceptible to the politicization and weaponization of their assets. Even companies like Norway’s Telenor, that have made commitments to human rights, can be forced to compromise or risk losing the market and jeopardizing their employees.

Shutdowns, the most sweeping form of online censorship, have been used with increasing frequency in recent years, including during ongoing protests in Iran. According to Access Now and the #KeepItOn coalition, at least 182 internet shutdowns occurred in 34 countries in 2021, including during elections and protests - times when access to information and communication can be a matter of life or death.

Governments, who often own mobile operators in whole or in part, also frequently compel companies to engage in, or enable, either mass surveillance or the tracking of specific individuals. They may carry this out in a number of ways: by ordering the installation of surveillance equipment on a network, demanding the retention of user data, or by requiring the use of a mobile app, as the Qatari government has done with its Hayya app, required of all attendees of the 2022 FIFA World Cup and for which state-owned Ooredoo is offering free SIMs.

In addition to the many human rights risks created by close government ties, telcos also perpetuate harms of their own making. While they engage in necessary traffic-shaping practices to optimize the flow of data across networks, sometimes telcos also use similar tactics to distort how information travels in order to prioritize some types of services or content, frequently in partnership with Big Tech. This is carried out through zero-rating programs, which give free access to certain apps or sites, usually as a part of pre-paid subscriptions, driving traffic away from other parts of the web.

This is particularly problematic in the Global South, where a large portion of the population relies on zero-rating programs to access the internet. Facebook famously launched its Free Basics program in 2013 with the purported goal of connecting rural communities. But as the company became a main gateway for these communities to access the web, a report by Global Voices found that Meta was acting like an ISP and collecting users’ traffic data.

Meanwhile, telcos have also been adopting Big Tech’s surveillance advertising business model, which famously contributes to the rampant spread of extremist speech and disinformation. This has resulted in similarly discriminatory and inaccurate content boosted through algorithms to large audiences, and an incentive to collect as much data as possible. And the data telcos collect is even more precise, given the services they provide.

Since the reversal of Roe v. Wade in the U.S. earlier this year, state governments that have banned abortion can order telcos to provide information about their users’ geolocation, call records, and messaging data.

For the past several years, the rise of Big Tech has deflected much-needed attention away from other actors, like telecom companies, with just as much power over people’s ability to realize their rights online. Before authoritarian and authoritarian-leaning governments fully silo off the global web, policymakers and others who care about digital rights must demand more transparency, including on government contracts, and help buoy stronger global governance of telcos.

Our research at Ranking Digital Rights, including the Telco Giants Scorecard, has long found that even the most human rights-forward telcos disclose significantly less information about their policies and practices affecting users' rights than their Big Tech counterparts do. Their activities are in desperate need of more attention worthy of the immense power these companies wield.