MANILA, Philippines (Update 4, 4:13 p.m.) — President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. approved Tuesday the 90-day extension of the deadline for SIM registration, Information and Communications Technology Secretary Ivan Uy announced in a news conference in Malacañang.
"Within that 90-day period, we urge our kababayans to take advantage of this extension to register the SIM cards," Uy said. "We anticipate there will probably be around 18 to 20 million that still need to be registered."
Uy said they are "exploring some options" to "incentivize" users to register early, which include deactivating some services like social media access should people fail to register within a certain period of time.
"That way, it will definitely make the public feel that we’re serious with the deactivation without completely cutting them off the services," Uy said. "But after the 90 days, that’s when they will feel the full cut off of all the services."
Ahead of Uy's announcement, Malacañang's broadcasting arm RTVM said "failure to register within the given period of extension will result to limited SIM services from the telecommunication companies."
Earlier Tuesday, Justice Secretary Jesus Crispin Remulla also said that "most of the services" of SIM users who do not register within the extension period "will be cut off."
"So there will be social media unavailability for those who do not register in the next 90 days," said Remulla, who was first to anounce the extension of the SIM registration deadline.
Republic Act No. 11934 or the SIM Registration Act provides that all existing SIM users must register within 180 days from the effectivity of the law. This can be extended by the Department of Information and Communications Technology by another 120 days.
The law states that failure to register the SIMs within those periods will result in its automatic deactivation, which will only be reactivated after registration.
Nothing in the law states that the government or telcos can limit access to social media if users do not register during the extension period.
Sen. Grace Poe, who shepherded the passage of the SIM Registration Act at the Senate, welcomed the extension, saying the law was "not meant to punish legitimate SIM subscribers especiall those at remote areas."
"Both (the National Telecommunications Commission) and telcos must double their efforts in reaching out to subscribers in rural and remote areas. While a number of locations have been visited for remote registration, a lot more ground needs to be covered as key areas such as [the Bangsamoro region] have yet to be reached according to the data by NTC," Poe said in a statement.
The announcement of the extension came on the eve of the original April 26 deadline of SIM registration, when less than 50% of the country’s total active 168 million SIMs have been registered which prompted calls from some sectors to extend the deadline for registration, if not to completely scrap it.
Information and Communications Technology Secretary Ivan Uy was expected to make an announcement regarding the extension of the SIM registration deadline at a news conference in Malacañang later today, following a meeting with President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.
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.
The possibility of extending the deadline for SIM registration was raised Monday in a meeting between the DICT and telecommunications companies.
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.
The SIM Registration Act 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. — with a report from Kristine Joy Patag