Restriction on Internet Freedom by the Junta
payment system has been relied for cash transfers. The Kpay accounts with high cash flows
were monitored and freezed by the junta in cooperation with banks. It was reported that
various accounts were blocked, as an example, the Kpay account of the CDM support
committee of Dawei University in Tanintharyi Region used for funding was locked. 21
Moreover, three residents from Tabayin township of Shwe Bo District in Sagaing Region were
arrested and charged under Section 50(J) of the Counter-Terrorism Law for allegedly
supporting PDF on September 3.22
Mytel’s monopoly
The operator Mytel which is a consortium of Myanmar military and Vietnamese Ministry of
Defense on January 12 of 2017 is one of the main economic pillars providing massive profits
to the junta. Since the February coup, Myanmar people began to boycott the military-own
businesses, including Mytel. Telenor planned to sell its shares and leave the country as the
junta asked telecommunications companies in Myanmar to install interception spyware that
could intercept the personal communications23 which is against the international human
rights standards.
While users of Ooredoo, Telenor, and MPT have to use a VPN in accessing Facebook,
Wikipedia,
21
and
other
websites
and
software,
Mytel
monopolizes
the
local
(2021, September 14). “ထားဝယ်တကသိုလ်က ေထာက်ပံ့ေရးအလှခံေနသည့် Kpay အေကာင့် ပိတ်ခံရ”. Available at
http://burmese.dvb.no/archives/487589
22
Shwe Phone Myat San. (2021, September 3). “KBZ Pay နဲ Wave Pay ကိစေတွေကာင့် ဒီပဲယင်းနယ်မှာ လူ၃ဦး
အဖမ်းခံထားရ”. Available at https://voiceofmyanmarnews.com/news/2021/09/03/kbz-pay%E1%80%94%E1%80%B2%E1%80%B7-wave-pay-
%E1%80%84%E1%80%BD%E1%80%B1%E1%80%9C%E1%80%BD%E1%80%BE%E1%80%B2%E1%80%80%E1
%80%AD%E1%80%85%E1%80%B9%E1%80%85%E1%80%80%E1%80%BC%E1%80%B1%E1%80%AC%E1%80
%84/
23
Irrawaddy. (2021, September 15). “ြမန်မာိုင်ငံတွင် ဆက်ရှိေနေရး မြဖစ်ိုင်ဟု တယ်လီေနာ ေကညာ”. Available at
https://burma.irrawaddy.com/news/short-news/2021/09/15/246021.html
9