In early February 2025, the Provincial Electricity Authority of Thailand (PEA) flipped the switches off on five border locations supplying parts of eastern Myanmar — including the notorious scam-compound hubs of Myawaddy, Payathonzu, Tachileik, and surrounding areas. The cutoff, coordinated by Thailand's National Security Council and reinforced by telecom restrictions ordered through the National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission (NBTC), severed not just electricity, but cross-border fibre links, mobile backhaul, and fuel deliveries that for years had quietly sustained an industrial-scale criminal economy on the Myanmar side.
The targets were not abstract. Compounds in the Karen State borderlands have been credibly linked by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and the United States Institute of Peace to billions of dollars in pig-butchering fraud, romance scams, and forced labour involving tens of thousands of trafficked workers from across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Thailand's action followed weeks of high-profile rescues, including the case of Chinese actor Wang Xing, whose abduction galvanised public opinion in Beijing and pushed Bangkok into a more assertive posture.
It is hard not to feel a certain grim satisfaction watching the lights go out on call centres that have ruined lives on every continent. But for a publication that defends the open internet and proportionate regulation, the Thai precedent demands a harder look. Cross-border digital sovereignty actions — even well-intentioned ones — set the rules that authoritarian neighbours will copy tomorrow.
What Thailand actually did
The cutoff was striking for three reasons. First, it was unilateral: Thailand did not seek authorisation from Myanmar's State Administration Council, nor from any multilateral body. Second, it was infrastructural: rather than targeting individual criminal accounts, platforms, or money flows, it took offline entire civilian regions, including hospitals, schools, refugee populations, and small businesses caught in the same grid as the compounds. Third, it was extraterritorial enforcement by utility — using commercial supply contracts as a national-security instrument, a tactic with few clear precedents in Southeast Asia.
Reuters and the Bangkok Post reported that the PEA terminated power supply agreements covering an estimated 20 megawatts of demand, while NBTC ordered Thai telcos including AIS and True to restrict cross-border circuits to the affected zones. Within days, satellite imagery and on-the-ground reporting showed compounds shifting to diesel generators and Starlink terminals — a partial workaround that nonetheless raised costs and disrupted operations.
The case for action
No serious analyst denies the problem. UNODC's 2023 and 2024 regional assessments described Southeast Asian scam compounds as a transnational criminal threat of "unprecedented scale," with estimated annual losses to victims in the tens of billions of dollars. Thailand had legitimate grievances: its territory, its electricity, its fibre, its banks, and its visa-free entry points were being used as the logistical backbone of crimes against its own citizens and trading partners.
From a proportionality standpoint, cutting off paid commercial services to entities credibly linked to organised crime is a far cry from, say, ordering Apple to break end-to-end encryption or compelling platforms to deploy upload filters. It is closer to a sanctions action — refusing to subsidise wrongdoing with state-owned infrastructure. That is a legitimate sovereign choice.
Why the precedent is dangerous anyway
The trouble lies in the method. Internet shutdowns are, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Access Now have documented for over a decade, an indiscriminate weapon. They harm journalists, doctors, students, refugees, and ordinary residents alongside their intended targets. Access Now's #KeepItOn coalition has tracked more than 1,750 shutdowns globally since 2016, and a near-universal finding is that the stated security justification rarely survives independent scrutiny.
Thailand's action is narrower than a nationwide shutdown, but it normalises a template that less scrupulous governments will eagerly adopt:
- Infrastructure as foreign policy. If Bangkok can cut power and fibre to a neighbour's territory on national-security grounds, what stops India from doing the same to Bangladesh, or China to its periphery, when the political winds shift?
- Civilian collateral. Karen civil society groups and humanitarian organisations have reported disruptions to clinics, schools, and ethnic-minority communities that had nothing to do with the compounds.
- Encryption and resilience side-effects. The compounds' rapid migration to Starlink and mesh networks shows that determined criminals route around shutdowns — while ordinary users, who cannot afford the workarounds, bear the cost. EFF's recent Hackers Guide to Circumventing Internet Shutdowns exists precisely because legitimate users keep getting caught in these crossfires.
A better playbook
A pro-innovation, proportionate response would treat the scam-compound economy as a financial and trafficking problem first, and an infrastructure problem only as a last and narrow resort:
- Targeted financial sanctions against compound operators, their bank accounts, and crypto on/off-ramps — work already begun by the U.S. Treasury's OFAC and the UK's OFSI against figures like Cambodian tycoon Ly Yong Phat.
- Platform-level cooperation with Meta, Google, and Telegram on takedowns of recruitment ads, in line with existing intermediary-liability frameworks rather than new mandates.
- Cross-border law enforcement through ASEAN and Interpol, with judicial oversight — not utility bills as a substitute for warrants.
- Transparency and sunset clauses for any infrastructure-level action: public criteria, defined duration, independent review, and explicit carve-outs for humanitarian connectivity.
Thailand's lights-out moment may yet prove a tactical success. But the strategic cost — establishing that utility shutoffs are a normal instrument of regional digital policy — will be paid by the open internet for years. Innovation, free speech, and economic integration in Southeast Asia depend on the assumption that the wires stay on. Once governments learn they can be switched off, the assumption is gone.