5/22/22, 12:03 AM Myanmar: Freedom on the Net 2021 Country Report | Freedom House infrastructure and the internet backbone. Myanmar has three underwater and four overland internet gateways. 50 Because experts projected that bandwidth demand would grow 70 percent annually in the near future, before the coup more companies expected to develop infrastructure, 51 including through new satellite connections. 52 Since the coup, there has been no progress toward these goals. Myanmar has 68,000 kilometers of fiber-optic cable and 11,000 more under construction. 53 The first private undersea internet cable, the Myanmar-Malaysia-Thailand International Connection (MYTHIC), was installed by the Campana Group, a company based in Singapore and jointly owned by Myanmar and Thailand. It began selling wholesale access to telecommunications companies in 2017. 54 The Campana Group planned to build a second undersea cable, called SIGMAR, with enough bandwidth to serve for at least 10 years, 55 though little was known about the progress of the cable’s development as of May 2021. Myanmar’s government planned to launch a second satellite, MyanmarSat-2, in 2020 to support telecommunications infrastructure. 56 The satellite, built in a joint project with Hokkaido University in Japan, was held at the International Space Station following the coup, awaiting a Japanese decision as to whether it should be deployed at the risk of enabling military surveillance. 57 The legal framework has no specific regulations related to bandwidth throttling, but many legal provisions are vague and broad, meaning they can be misused for such purposes. A draft cybersecurity law under consideration in recent years that was created by the government could include restrictive provisions that affect Myanmar’s internet infrastructure (see C2). 58 A4 0-6 pts Are there legal, regulatory, or economic obstacles that restrict the diversity of service providers? 1/6 Score Change: The score declined from 2 to 1 due to increased military control over and pressure against providers, which led Telenor, one of the country’s main providers, to write off its Myanmar operation as a total financial loss during the coverage period. Since the coup, the military has seized control of the state-owned mobile operator, MPT, in addition to the military-owned operator Mytel. 59 As a result, the military is now in direct control of more than half of all mobile subscriptions as well as much of the telecommunications infrastructure, which is managed by MPT. 60 This has undermined the diversity of operators and, through the infrastructure, given the military a near monopoly in the telecommunications sector. Furthermore, the military, via the MoTC, has been issuing a significant number of directives to telecommunications companies, the legality of which the companies have questioned in many cases. 61 The volume and nature of the directives raised concerns among civil society actors about whether telecommunications companies are operationally independent from the military. Several stakeholders have confirmed that the military’s detention of senior business leaders from other sectors likely encouraged telecommunications companies to implement military demands without complaint. 62 TOP The military pressure in the form of directives and threats to staff led one of the nation’s main mobile providers, Norway’s Telenor, to sell its Myanmar operations to a Lebanon-based company in July 2021, 63 after the coverage period. Telenor had written off its business in the country in May, essentially https://freedomhouse.org/country/myanmar/freedom-net/2021 6/28