This is just to say that our government’s ability to locate the exact button that makes otherwise peaceful human beings want to flip tables is uncanny.
I, fresh from meditation, have been informed that apparently our government is banning things again.
There goes my two minutes of peace.
Ban reflex
On March 20, the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) said Roblox risked being banned because its platform was reportedly being used for sexual predation and grooming.
Similarly, Facebook also risks being blocked over delayed takedowns and child-safety concerns, among others.
Most recently, on Sept. 21, in the aftermath of the Sept. 18 shooting incident at Banga National High School in South Cotabato, the Cybercrime Investigation and Coordinating Center (CICC) gave Reddit and Discord 24 hours to comply with its order to designate local representatives and submit implementation plans for platform safety measures.
Failure to comply could result in a nationwide access prohibition.
True enough, Discord was actually banned in the country. The ban lasted for hours, and access to the platform was restored after Discord committed to cooperating with Philippine authorities on child-safety measures.
So, we moved rather quickly from “explain yourselves” to “comply within 24 hours,” to Filipinos waking up to an inaccessible communications platform, and then to access being restored.
Which raises the rather obvious question of whether shutting down platforms needed to happen in the first place.
Bigger problem
Three shootings involving students within a few months should alarm us. We have a family-centered culture where everybody knows everybody else’s business before you do.
We used to watch school shootings from a safe distance as something that happens in more individualistic societies, e.g., America. And given the Philippines’ documented problem of online child sexual exploitation and grooming, concerns about what children encounter online are hardly imagined.
What bothers me is how quickly our preferred knee-jerk response when something terrible happens online is to turn everything into a conversation about regulation and, more specifically, BANNING.
Even the shootings present a complicated policy problem involving not just online influence, but also school security, adult responsibility and the troubling question of government employees’ ability to safeguard their firearms responsibly. There is also everything that happened before the teenager arrived at school with a gun.
The system has several parts, and online influence may very well be one of them. But we’re not seeing our officials scrambling to show us that the whole system is being examined and corrected. That, of course, takes considerable work.
We’re also not seeing government employees being banned from gun ownership or all parents being required to submit an implementation plan for child security. Obviously, that would be absurd. Not all government employees or parents are implicated. But neither are all Discord users.
Yet somehow, very quickly, they arrive at the simplest available answer: ban the entire platform.
Public interest
I don’t mind regulation. It’s part of healthy governance. Regulation is there to recognize inequities and the fact that private interests do not always align with the public interest.
But public interest also requires recognizing that the act of regulation involves judgment and weighing. Because while the public needs online safety, it also needs technology.
Our government itself has spent years advocating the learning and use of technology, with a chunk of its budget being spent on “upskilling.” And people have learned to use technology for work, to operate their businesses, make transactions, communicate, speak, learn and be informed.
Entire communities and livelihoods now sit on platforms that apparently the government can decide to switch off within days, at whim.
So when the response to harm is to quickly ban technology, I’m not sure they’re actually protecting the public interest. They’re simply sacrificing one public interest for another without bothering to perform the difficult task of weighing the two.
That is just lazy regulation.
Legal nuance
This confuses the lawyer in me.
It has been a running joke that the government is crawling with lawyers, usually said as if this were itself evidence of bureaucratic excess. Potentially, sure.
But in defense of putting lawyers in government agencies, lawyers are needed even in highly technical ones not because they know more about the technical aspects of the job than the technicians—although I would argue that they should know enough, at least—but because technical expertise is only one part of regulation.
Someone still has to ask what the government can do, what it should do, who else gets affected, whether the intervention is broader than the problem, and what rights are being traded away in the process.
They are included because they are trained for nuance—theoretically.
Lawyers will point out with all passion that “may” is not “shall.” They’d lose sleep over “provided that…” and even more so when it disappears. We’d fight over the implications of using “and” over “or,” the exhaustiveness of a list, the difference between using “a person” instead of “an individual,” and commas that everyone else manages to live perfectly normal lives without noticing.
This is not pedantry for its own sake. A word can change the reach of government power, and it’s a difficult position to be in when you find yourself on the other side of that power.
Precision matters because the government can afford ambiguity far more than us little people if we get caught in it.
So, I am baffled that institutions crawling with people professionally trained to distinguish, qualify, balance and narrow can encounter a complicated technological problem and arrive so quickly at the broadest possible response: BAN IT.
Can we not?
Narrower means
Our laws themselves are suspicious of broad exercises of government power. We have been taught concepts like overbreadth, proportionality, necessity and, depending on the rights involved, the availability of less restrictive means.
These principles do different work and apply in different circumstances, but essentially, the instinct is that the government should not take more than it needs to accomplish a legitimate purpose.
Protecting children is without question a legitimate purpose. Which is also what makes the rhetoric around it so sinister. It becomes very difficult to stand up and oppose a measure done in the name of protecting children without sounding like you are somehow against protecting children.
I want to protect children. But I also love my tools; they are very useful in my life—in a legal way. It’s not an either-or situation.
People should be able to continue using their tools, especially when they have done nothing wrong, not only because starting over with another tool sucks, but more importantly because losing them costs people their associations, access to personalized information, safe spaces for expression and livelihoods.
While none of these rights are absolute, the existence of a legitimate objective does not relieve the government of the obligation to consider them or to weigh one public interest against another.
This is why the regulatory analysis cannot end with “protect the children,” and regulatory action cannot begin with banning.
Where the principle of overbreadth applies, we should ask whether a measure unnecessarily affects other legitimate uses. The principle of proportionality asks: Is the method too much for what we want to accomplish? Necessity and less restrictive means force the inconvenient question: Can we accomplish the same legitimate objective while interfering with fewer rights?
And I would like to think that the government understands this.
Other options
After all, even in these recent cases, the CICC felt the need to ask platforms for explanations, local representatives, safety measures, age-assurance mechanisms and implementation plans.
There is even something resembling a show of due process—all within a generous 24-hour window, with a ban waiting on the other end.
This makes the reflexive talk of banning even more irritating. The government knows there are narrower mechanisms to address problems.
Yet when it comes to platforms, there seems to be a political instinct to implement the broadest possible intervention before demonstrating why a narrower one will not work.
Banning is top of mind.
Maybe because banning is loud. It is immediate; it sounds decisive; and we feel it—but not in a good way.
We see the performance. Something terrible happened on the internet today, and look, the government is doing something.
Hard work
Understanding the system is less exciting. Somebody has to understand what failed, the complications that allowed it to happen, and what the best response is and why.
This takes time, and much of it is done—if it is done—by invisible government workers whose names we may never know, somewhere in the backend, doing the unphotogenic work of making things function without expecting an immediate press conference to announce that they have, in fact, been working.
I once read—or probably saw in a reel—that one mark of an effective employee is that eventually you barely notice them. Everything works, so you stop thinking about the person making it work.
The government is essentially our employee and perhaps should similarly be invisible. Systems work and services arrive; cybersecurity holds; regulators regulate. Rain is just wet; it doesn’t have to swallow our legs every time, without our consent. There’s drinkable water in our faucet, and we can afford electricity.
We get on with our lives without needing to know which official fixed what in the morning. Everything just gets fixed. Everything works. No complaints.
Let’s dream.
Costly expertise
But here we are. Our agencies ask for billions every year.
We’re paying an entire government apparatus composed of lawyers, engineers, technical experts and policy people billions of pesos precisely because they’re supposed to understand these things better than the rest of us—and also to consider us.
Not so we can wake up one morning and be told yet again that another government system has been hacked. Or be told with a straight face and remarkable confidence that blockchain is tamper-proof or 101% hack-free.
And certainly not so that, after all that supposed expertise and all those billions, the regulatory response we can come up with to a complicated technology problem is: BAN IT.
Anybody can say that for free.
P19 billion—reportedly the proposed DICT budget for 2027—should buy us something more intellectually expensive than that: perhaps some nuance, a dash of thought, and crossing fingers, I know this is a long shot—an application of policy expertise.
Meaning: do the hard part; understand the system; consider the consequences; consider us.
And if, after all that, the answer really is a ban, then be able to convince us why shutting down access to our associations, information, safe spaces for expression and livelihoods is necessary.
I’d also want my two minutes of peace back.
Nikki Mendez is a corporate lawyer specializing in technology, including cloud computing, cybersecurity, privacy, and intelligent systems, guiding pivotal technology transactions and policy developments.
