Empathy's NM and ConnMan integration can be turned off by setting the gsettings key org.gnome.Empathy use-conn to false. MC doesn't read this setting; nor does it have any other way to force it to believe it's online. It should read/migrate Empathy's old setting, and have some way going forward to switch this on and off.
As of 5.10.1, MC does read Empathy's setting.
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