By Jie Zhang

This post is part of Global Voices’ October 2026 Spotlight series, “Big Tech and Authoritarianism.” In this Spotlight, we explore how Big Tech facilitates and hinders authoritarian governments and practices, and how these choices influence the Global South. You can support this coverage by donating here.

In March 2022, just over a year after Myanmar’s military coup, Telenor, the Norwegian telecommunications giant, sold its subsidiary in the country to M1 Group, bringing nearly eight years of operation to an end. But leaving Myanmar did not end the controversy surrounding its departure. Instead, the hasty exit came back to haunt the company over the next four years.

Since then, criticisms, lawsuits and litigation by civil society and affected people have continued to follow the company. The scrutiny also reached a crescendo this September, when Norwegian authorities opened criminal investigations into Telenor over allegations of aiding crimes against humanity in the country and transferring sanctioned surveillance equipment during the sale. Within days, a court in Norway also green-lit a class-action lawsuit brought on behalf of a group of Telenor’s former customers in Myanmar.

Telenor reiterated its position upon the investigation, arguing that any alternatives would have endangered the employees’ lives. Yet the company’s trouble raises a broader question that many telecommunication multinationals may have to confront one day: When a company decides to exit a “high-risk market,” where does its responsibility end?

Leaving is not just a business decision

Under military rule, Telenor faced government demands to facilitate surveillance, hand over the personal data of dissidents and activists, and restrict access to information. In a market like this, staying may cease to be viable. For a telecom operator, the matter is not simply to make a choice between remaining in the market or leaving, but whether it can exit in a way that minimizes further harm to users, without leaving them more vulnerable. Unfortunately, Telenor failed to do so.

In a conventional asset sale involving multinational companies, the transaction may center largely around physical and commercial assets, such as factories, equipment, and inventory. Selling a telecom subsidiary is another story.

As gatekeepers of internet access and digital information, telcos control sensitive user data, including location records and device logs. They also serve as key intermediaries for interception systems and have the technical capacity to cut off network access. In a sale, the company hands over not just infrastructure and commercial assets, but also systems and data that can expose the movements and footprints of millions of users. 

Without rigorous buyer scrutiny and assessments of the risks associated with the transfer, a corporate sale may lead to grave harm to users, who might be watched, tracked, or even silenced in authoritarian contexts.

What followed in Myanmar showed that the risk was anything but hypothetical. It also revealed why powerful companies cannot simply shed their responsibilities by selling their business, when people depending on their services are left to bear the consequences.

A global pull back is underway

This matters because Telenor’s withdrawal from Myanmar is hardly an isolated case. After the debacle, the telecom giant began systematically pulling back from its Asian markets. In 2022, the company combined its Malaysian subsidiary Digi with local telecom service Celcom. In Thailand the following year, it merged its local business dtac with True Corporation before later selling down most of its stake in the entity. It also completed its sale of Telenor Pakistan to PTCL at the end of 2025, with further plans to dispense with its remaining Asian assets.

Zooming out, multinational telecom operators are shrinking the overseas footprints they spent decades building. MTN, Africa’s largest telecom operator, announced its plan to “orderly exit” from the Middle East in 2020 amid geopolitical risks. The company has ended its operations in Syria, Yemen, and Afghanistan by 2025. MTN also completed the sale of its operations in Guinea-Bissau and Guinea-Conakry in 2024, citing unsustainable costs.

Aiming to refocus on a small group of more profitable core markets — Britain, Brazil, Germany, and Spain — Spanish telecom giant Telefónica also accelerated its retreat from Spanish-speaking Latin America. In 2025 alone, it sold its subsidiaries in Argentina, Peru, Uruguay, and Ecuador, followed by exits from Colombia, Chile, and Mexico in early 2026.

The reasons for telecoms’ departure vary from geopolitical tensions to high costs. However, we should ask the critical question: what changes for the customers after a telecom operator leaves them behind?

What gets lost in the handover

While the network will continue to provide service to users, the transparency practices and internal procedures and protocols for data safeguards may change after a sale. This is where the risks of market exit are less visible. Telenor, MTN, and Telefónica have all developed sophisticated governance systems, including formal human rights policies, data-protection and security procedures, and regular transparency reporting. Research shows they are among the strongest performers on transparency and accountability in the telecom industry.

Those transparency reports provide a useful window into how telcos handle government demands. The reports describe the procedures in place to respond to government requests for user data, content restrictions, and network disruptions, and publish data on such requests across different markets. Although transparency alone cannot prevent abuse, it creates a public record of how governments exert pressure on companies.

However, we found that transparency reporting mostly does not survive ownership changes. Once a multinational operator leaves a market, it naturally stops reporting in that country. Disappointingly, its successors overwhelmingly fail to maintain the same level of transparency.

Millicom, a recurring buyer of Telefónica’s Latin American assets, acquired its operations in Uruguay and Ecuador, and a controlling stake in Colombia. Millicom does publish law-enforcement disclosures, but the data are aggregated by region rather than by country. Moreover, as of September 2026, only the 2024 report is publicly available. Elsewhere, the picture is even bleaker: None of the other recent buyers appeared to publish transparency reports or commit to continuing their predecessors’ transparency practices.

The discontinuation of transparency reporting removes the opportunity for the public to scrutinize whether or not the volume of the government demands changed after each ownership transition. It also hides from view how those demands are handled internally.

Transparency reporting, however, is only the tip of the iceberg. Beneath it lies a much broader mechanism of user data protections, institutional norms, and governance safeguards, such as risk escalation channels, legal and human rights checks, and many more.

In authoritarian states, multinational telcos are no less likely to face government pressure to shut down networks, block websites, or hand over user data. While these companies may also have limited room to resist, they usually operate under more institutional oversight than state-controlled ones. They are also exposed to more scrutiny from the international press and civil society, greater reputational risk, and often stronger regulatory frameworks established by their home countries.

By contrast, many operators who succeeded these businesses might be more closely connected to governments and more deeply embedded in the local political and regulatory environment. Facing fewer external constraints from society, media, and NGOs, they also have less willingness and fewer resources to challenge governments.

What a more responsible exit might look like

Since safeguards may weaken or even disappear with ownership shift, the essential duty to protect users’ rights should not be treated as an afterthought to a market exit. It must be a key element of the transaction.

For telecom companies, a responsible exit should begin well before a buyer is even selected. Before entering Myanmar in 2014, Telenor commissioned a human rights impact assessment (HRIA) for its planned market entry. The company also states that it considered human rights and data privacy as it prepared for its departure. But there is no public record showing that Telenor conducted a standalone assessment of the human rights risks of the exit itself.

Companies should commission a mandated, exit-specific human rights impact assessment, evaluating what user risks the sale itself might create, the concerns of stakeholders and users, how the data might be used or transferred in the future, and which groups of users would be most exposed to the risks it identifies.

Buyer due diligence should go beyond financial stability to examine the buyer’s human rights record, its capacity to govern sensitive data, and whether existing safeguards can survive under new ownership.

Moreover, a responsible exit from any politically risky market should also ask a basic question: What should not be transferred in a sale? Should every piece of user data be handed over to the next owner? Telecom companies should evaluate if any sensitive data can be segregated, anonymized, or even deleted whenever feasible, particularly when transferring such data could expose high-risk users.

Similarly, some technical infrastructure, such as surveillance equipment, interception systems, and other network-control capabilities, should not be bundled into a sale automatically as ordinary infrastructure. Norwegian authorities are now probing whether Telenor transferred sanctioned surveillance equipment as part of the sale of Telenor Myanmar without the required authorization from the Norwegian government.

A new test for the next exit

If Telenor offers a lesson for everyone about what can go wrong in a reckless departure from a high-risk market, MTN’s unfinished exit from Iran may offer a test about whether companies can approach their next departure differently.

MTN still holds a 49 percent stake in Irancell. The current U.S. sanctions on Iran also complicate any attempt to exit. Earlier this year, MTN also protested after the CEO of Irancell was ousted by the Iranian authorities over delaying an internet blackout order during the domestic protest. This arguably makes MTN’s position in Iran even more difficult than Telenor’s trajectory in Myanmar. When MTN is finally able to withdraw from the country, can it exit in a more responsible way?

This post is part of Advox, a Global Voices project dedicated to protecting freedom of expression online. All Posts

The Bridge features personal essays, commentary, and creative non-fiction that illuminate differences in perception between local and international coverage of news events, from the unique perspective of members of the Global Voices community. Views expressed do not necessarily represent the opinion of the community as a whole. All Posts

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