More than 500 of the roughly 1,000 cellular towers serving Bali’s Badung Regency are now sitting on a demolition list under an Indonesian court order, industry group Aspimtel warned September 15, 2026 — a threat serious enough to raise the specter of a communications blackout across Kuta, Seminyak, and Canggu.
One of the towercos in that demolition path traces back to DigitalBridge Group Inc., the Boca Raton, Florida infrastructure manager. DigitalBridge doesn’t hold a single Badung tower in its own name. Still, the company it controls does, and DigitalBridge’s Southeast Asia towers platform CEO personally holds the top governance seat at the entity that owns them.
The order comes from a Bali High Court ruling issued August 20, 2026, upholding a 2007 exclusivity agreement between Badung Regency and PT Bali Towerindo Sentra Tbk (BALI), extending it 20 years to 2047, and ordering every tower in the regency that Bali Towerindo doesn’t own to be torn down.
Badung filed a Supreme Court appeal on September 3, 2026, and no tower has come down yet—the ruling has no permanent legal force until that appeal is resolved. Badung is where Bali’s tourism economy actually runs, and a network collapse there would hit hospitality businesses running on cashless payments, including point-of-sale terminals and Indonesia’s national QRIS standard, while undercutting confidence in the country’s digital infrastructure more broadly.
Where DigitalBridge fits
One operator in that demolition path is PT EPID Menara AssetCo (EMA), which acquired roughly 4,200 towers from Indosat Ooredoo in 2021 for $750 million through DigitalBridge’s Southeast Asia platform, EdgePoint Infrastructure. EdgePoint didn’t keep those towers under its own name: in March 2022, Indonesian towerco Centratama Group bought EMA outright.
But Centratama isn’t independent of EdgePoint — EdgePoint had already built a majority stake in it through 2021, reaching 92.17 percent by April 2025, according to infrastructure-deal tracker Infralogic. Selling EMA to Centratama didn’t remove DigitalBridge’s interest in the asset; it moved the towers into a subsidiary it already controlled, EdgePoint. EdgePoint founder and CEO Suresh Sidhu holds the title of President Commissioner at EMA itself, according to corporate-registry records, in addition to commissioner roles at Centratama and its tower subsidiary, PT Centratama Menara Indonesia.
DigitalBridge itself is mid-sale. SoftBank Group Corp. agreed on December 29, 2025, to buy DigitalBridge for $16.00 a share, a deal valued at roughly $4.0 billion in enterprise value. Stockholders approved the deal in April 2026, but it still requires sign-off from US and international regulators, including the FCC and the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, and remained pending as of mid-September 2026. Whoever owns the Centratama stake once that closes inherits this fight.
EMA has already lost this argument once
This isn’t EMA’s first appearance in Badung litigation. Indonesia’s Supreme Court rejected a cassation brought by EMA and its sister company, PT Centratama Menara Indonesia, against the Badung Regent and Bali Towerindo in December 2024, with permanent legal force. Two years before the civil case made headlines, DigitalBridge’s Indonesian tower entity had already lost this exact argument once.
A cluster of related Supreme Court cases from 2024 and 2025 shows Mitratel (Telkom Indonesia-controlled), Protelindo (Djarum Group), Iforte (a Protelindo subsidiary), and Tower Bersama all separately litigating the same exclusivity claim, years ahead of the 2026 ruling. Mitratel won at the lower court and lost at the Supreme Court, withdrawing a further review bid in February 2025; Protelindo’s and Iforte’s cases have continued through Indonesia’s extraordinary review process, with outcomes that couldn’t be confirmed from public records; Tower Bersama’s case status is likewise unconfirmed.
Why this couldn’t happen in the U.S.
Nothing like Badung’s arrangement survives in the United States, and it comes down to one federal statute: Section 253 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which bars state and local governments from adopting or enforcing any requirement that prohibits or effectively prohibits an entity’s ability to provide telecommunications service.
A U.S. municipality that signed a 20-year exclusive tower concession, then went to court to have competitors’ infrastructure physically torn down to protect it, would be handing every excluded carrier a preemption lawsuit it would almost certainly win.
The FCC’s shot-clock and nondiscriminatory-treatment rules for wireless siting add another layer, constraining how localities can favor one carrier over another even short of outright exclusivity. And the demolition remedy itself cuts against a separate American norm: courts here are reluctant to order destruction of a third party’s property to settle a contract dispute between two other parties, which is effectively what happened in Badung, where the operators facing demolition weren’t even named defendants in Bali Towerindo’s suit. Indonesia has no equivalent federal backstop, which is exactly why a 2007 municipal contract was able to escalate into a court-ordered demolition of a regional wireless network.
