Marcos, DICT to discuss SIM registration extension
MANILA, Philippines — Communications and Information Technology Secretary Ivan Uy said Tuesday he will meet with President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to decide “once and for all” whether the deadline for SIM registration will be extended.
“We’ll be discussing the SIM registration, among others. This is important and this is urgent because tomorrow’s already the deadline, so we like to make some decisions once and for all,” Uy told ABS-CBN News Channel’s “Headstart.”
Uy said he may announce the decision on the SIM registration deadline at a press conference with the Malacañang Press Corps later Tuesday.
Marcos and Uy’s meeting comes on the eve of the deadline of SIM registration, when less than 60% of the country’s total active 168 million SIMs have been registered. There have already been calls from some sectors to extend the deadline for registration, if not completely scrap it.
Telcos’ appeal
The possibility of extending the deadline for SIM registration was raised Monday in a meeting between the DICT and telecommunications companies.
“The possibility of extending the SIM registration period was also discussed during the meeting. We advise everyone to await the official announcement of the department on the matter,” the DICT said Monday night in a statement.
The two largest telcos in the country, Globe Telecom and Smart Communications, have appealed to the government to extend the deadline for registration, which has been hampered by users’ lack of government-issued IDs.
Prior to Tuesday, the DICT has stood pat on keeping the April 26 deadline, even though the SIM Registration Act allows the government to extend this for 120 days.
‘Junk SIM registration’
Petitioners led by the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines have questioned before the Supreme Court the constitutionality of the law, arguing that it "restricts the constitutionally-guaranteed freedom of speech and violates the right against unreasonable searches and seizures and the right to substantive due process."
There is so far no indication whether the SC will come out Tuesday with a temporary restraining order that will pause the implementation of the SIM Registration Act.
The law was enacted with the goal of curbing crimes committed through text messages, particularly spam and scam texts which were rampant when the proposal was being deliberated in Congress.
This drummed up public support for the law, even as civil society groups and some ICT experts warned that SIM registration might not at all be effective in reducing spam and scams as they pointed to other countries, like Singapore, where users continue to receive such messages.
If the deadline is not extended beyond April 26, SIMs and eSIMs that remain unregistered after that date will be deactivated, which can lead to a world of inconvenience for millions of users as they stand to lose access to social media, banks and e-wallets.
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