Estonia kept its second place in U.S. based Freedom House's global Internet freedom index. For the third year in a row, Iceland was ranked as the best environment for internet freedom, achieving 96 points out of 100. Estonia ranks second among the 70 countries assessed in the report with 94 points, followed by Canada, Costa Rica and Taiwan. The least free countries were China, Iran and Myanmar.

Despite the favourable report, several potential issues were also identified.

• Estonia continues to invest in the deployment of broadband infrastructure, but the distribution of 5G permits has suffered from a significantly delayed tendering process (see A1 and A4).
• In October 2020, the Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications proposed amendments to the Electronic Communications Act, which would have forced people to verify their identity when purchasing a pre-paid SIM card and required messaging services, including WhatsApp, Viber, and Skype, to register as communication service providers. However, this provision was not included in an updated version of the bill (see C4 and C6).
• In December 2020, it was revealed that the Estonian government was a likely client of Circles, a surveillance company that allows customers to monitor calls, texts, and cell phone geolocation by exploiting weaknesses in mobile telecommunications infrastructure (see C5).

https://freedomhouse.org/count...

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