Eighteen months after President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. signed Executive Order No. 74 ordering the wind-down of Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators (POGOs) by December 31, 2024, Manila is discovering an old lesson of internet policy: when the state blocks a website, users find another route. The National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) has spent 2025 and early 2026 expanding ISP-level blocking lists against offshore gambling portals and unlicensed content sites — and Filipinos, predictably, have responded by downloading virtual private networks in record numbers. Now Philippine senators and officials at the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) are publicly debating whether to follow regional neighbours and clamp down on VPN tools themselves. That would be a serious mistake.
From POGO Ban to Blocking Spree
EO 74 was a defensible response to a genuine harm. POGOs, originally licensed by PAGCOR to serve foreign markets, had become magnets for human-trafficking rings, financial scams and abuse of Filipino and foreign workers. Congressional hearings in 2024 documented horrifying cases. Shutting down the licensing regime addressed the on-the-ground criminal enterprises that POGOs had spawned.
The follow-on blocking regime, however, is a different animal. NTC orders direct local ISPs to null-route domains identified by PAGCOR and other agencies as offshore gambling, scam or unlicensed content sites. The lists have grown opaquely and inconsistently, sweeping in benign mirrors, news aggregators and even legitimate fintech pages by collateral. Because the orders are issued under broad statutory authority — including powers the agency reads into the Internet Transactions Act (RA 11967) of 2023 — there is little public process, no published appeals mechanism, and no sunset clause.
Predictably, Filipinos have voted with their installers. Industry trackers and app-store rankings show VPN apps repeatedly cracking the top free downloads on iOS and Android in the Philippines through 2025. Some reports place the country among Southeast Asia's fastest-growing VPN markets. The phenomenon is not new — the same pattern followed Indonesia's Reddit and Vimeo blocks, and India's repeated app bans — but the scale here is striking precisely because Manila has not, until now, been a censoring jurisdiction.
The Senate Floats a Crackdown
That is what is prompting the new debate. Several senators have argued that a VPN "loophole" undermines both the POGO ban and the integrity of the SIM Registration Act (RA 11934), the 2022 law that required all mobile subscribers to register their identities with carriers. If Filipinos can mask their IPs, the reasoning goes, then identity-linked accountability online is incomplete. DICT officials have so far been more cautious, noting that VPNs underpin remote work, banking and journalism, but the idea of licensing or restricting consumer VPNs is now openly on the table.
Civil society is pushing back hard. Digital rights groups and press-freedom advocates — including local partners of international organisations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation — have warned that a VPN restriction would put the Philippines on a regulatory trajectory closer to Myanmar's 2025 cybersecurity law or China's Great Firewall than to its ASEAN democratic peers. As researchers documenting the region have noted, encrypted tunnels are not optional infrastructure for journalists, activists, LGBTQ+ Filipinos and survivors of online harassment; they are baseline tools of personal safety.
Why the Crackdown Logic Fails
The case against a Philippine VPN restriction rests on three points that policymakers should weigh carefully.
First, it would not work. VPN protocols are general-purpose and easily disguised as ordinary HTTPS traffic. Even the most aggressive deep-packet inspection regimes — China, Iran, Russia — leak constantly. A middle-income democracy with an open economy and a large BPO sector cannot meaningfully filter at that level without breaking the legitimate internet its growth depends on.
Second, it would punish the wrong people. POGO operators and offshore scam compounds run their own infrastructure and have ample means to evade any consumer-grade restriction. The Filipinos affected by a VPN ban would be remote workers logging into employer networks, freelancers using geo-locked services, journalists protecting sources, and ordinary users seeking privacy from the data-broker ecosystem that the National Privacy Commission itself has flagged as a growing risk.
Third, it would damage the digital economy. The Philippines is positioning itself as a regional IT-BPO and digital services hub, with the sector contributing an estimated 8-9% of GDP. Corporate VPNs are foundational to that industry. A licensing regime — even one nominally targeted at "consumer" VPNs — would create compliance ambiguity, deter foreign investment, and signal that Manila is willing to break the open internet to prop up an enforcement strategy that has not even been independently audited.
A Better Path
A proportionate response would start by narrowing, not expanding, the NTC's blocking powers. Block-lists should be published, time-limited, and subject to a fast independent appeals mechanism. PAGCOR's offshore gambling enforcement should focus on payment rails — the choke point where global anti-money-laundering frameworks actually work — rather than on URL whack-a-mole. The Internet Transactions Act's consumer-protection machinery should be activated against actual fraud, not weaponised as a content-control instrument.
Most importantly, lawmakers should resist the seductive but flawed equation of "VPN = evasion." Filipinos use VPNs overwhelmingly for the same reasons everyone else does: privacy, security, work, and freedom from surveillance. Treating that as a problem to be solved would tell the world that the Philippines is willing to trade the open internet for the illusion of enforcement. That is a trade the country cannot afford to make.