Censorship

That was quite a fiasco.

The Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT), led by Sec. Henry Aguda, ordered the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) to block the platform Discord. Literally hours later, in the face of community outrage, they restored the platform.

Two questions arise immediately.

First, does the DICT understand what the platforms do? As regulators, they are expected to be the experts. Platforms facilitate communications. They do not produce the content – although they are the convenient scapegoats when anything bad happens, such as school shootings.

Second, what exactly are DICT’s powers? Is the agency empowered to shut down platforms without due process? In the Discord case, the authorities shut down a platform without, apparently, knowing what it is all about.

Discord, to be sure, has an unsettling name that calls up images of riots and anarchy. What it is, in reality, is a pretty efficient platform for online commerce that thousands in this country depend on for their livelihood. By imperiously shutting down the platform, the DICT caused widespread displacement and a very angry community of users.

The fiasco, put in perspective, should be truly disturbing.

The Discord affair tells us the agency we trust to help deliver the country to the digital age is incompetently manned. More than that, it tends to be ham-fisted in formulating a viable policy that will lead us to this goal.

It was the DICT that recommended that Meta chair be summoned to a congressional hearing. The congressmen, unable to think better, entertained the possibility. Which produced another fiasco.

The DICT likewise proposes that a congressional franchise be required for platforms to operate. How out of touch could this agency be?

Digital communications are borderless by nature. Governments have vainly tried to reverse that by requiring platforms to moderate the content that flows through them. The old world of bordered states are trying to foreclose a future where information is borderless.

It is convenient for government to blame the platforms for rising public displeasure with their performance. Then they try to police it – or at least force the platforms to regulate content, presumably to allow only content favorable to the powers that be. The word for that is censorship.

Censoring internet traffic requires a large amount of underpaid monitors at the expense of taxpayers – against the interest of taxpayers. The Great Firewall of China is maintained presumably by tens of thousands of censors combing through millions of posts with little assistance from algorithms. This is monumental waste of social resources. Freedom is cheaper and liberating.

This government, it seems, is bent on establishing a regime of censorship. That is unachievable except through the creation of every sort of bureaucratic hurdle imaginable. The better course is for government to simply deliver better.

Recall the tumult in Nepal last year when the government provoked internet users by attempting to control the web. Nepal’s government did not survive that attempt.

Equalizer

Local government units are part and parcel of of an integrated system of governance. More accessible to their constituents, they are better positioned to respond to the challenges their communities face – whether this be agricultural productivity or responses to calamity.

Empowering local governments is the whole point of the Local Government Code. But empowerment cannot happen with uneven resources. This is the whole point of the Local Government Support Fund (LGSF). They even out the unavoidable disparities between richer and poorer municipalities in building development in their localities.

The Code provides local governments a share of national taxes collected. But the existing formulas do not erase the differences in population, geography, economic base, administrative capacity and development needs. The LGU share alone will not cure the imbalance between rich cities and poor towns.

The LGSF helps correct the imbalance. It enables those who need more to receive more. The fund may be understood as an instrument for equalizing progress.

The idea of a support fund is not anything new. We have had attempts for decades to equalize opportunities for localities. But with paltry resources, we could achieve only paltry results.

Over the past few years, the LGSF has been progressively enhanced. With enough funding support, LGUs are better enabled to seize economic opportunities as they present themselves, build resiliency where it is most needed and attend to peculiar local needs with more telling effect.

With enhanced funding, there are also enhanced challenges. Government must now prove the enhanced fund can be accessed fairly, monitored properly and used for projects with immediate impact to the lives of localities. The enhanced LGSF must provide for a direct and rules-based process to counteract the tendency for political gatekeepers to control access to the funds. The most reliable instrument has been to rely on participatory budgeting that opens the space for citizens to help shape and monitor development choices.

The present initiative called “Sa Bagong Pilipinas, Bawat Bayan Makikinabang” puts together several mechanisms to ensure efficient deployment of the enhanced funding. The Growth Equity Fund addresses disparities in fiscal capacity. The Barangay Development Program brings services to previously conflict-affected communities.

The whole program is equipped with digital monitoring systems organized under the Ugnayang Bayan Portal. Included here is the Centralized Open Monitoring Platform for Appropriations and Statistics (COMPASS) which makes the process more transparent and less dependent on political brokerage.

Open digital monitoring should be an antidote to corruption.