The Discord ban missed everyone it was aimed at

The Philippine government blocked the popular messaging app Discord on Wednesday night. By Thursday lunchtime it was lifted. That's less than a day, start to finish. Let's discuss!

What was the point?

The stated reason was "children". The Cybercrime Investigation and Coordinating Center (CICC) had given Discord and Reddit 24 hours to set up a local presence, after the shooting at Banga National High School in South Cotabato. The concerns they named were "nihilistic violent extremism", grooming, and the radicalization of minors. DICT Secretary Henry Aguda put it plainly: "Encrypted communication is valid — we use it for cybersecurity. But why do minors need encrypted communication?"

Who got actually cut off

There are roughly 67.7 million gamers in the Philippines (source), or close to 60% of the total population. People aged 18 to 34 make up around 69% of that. And here's a surprising tidbit: the 35-to-44 age group has the highest daily gaming rate in the country at 46%, higher than teenagers and higher than twenty-somethings.

Gaming here isn't a kids' thing, and it hasn't been for years. It's a mainstream adult habit, mostly on mobile phones, played daily by people with jobs and bills to pay.

Discord sits on top of a lot of that, but what our government agencies didn't realize is that it's not just for gaming. Study groups, freelancers, remote teams, hobby clubs, local dev communities, church groups use it too. All of that went kaput on Wednesday evening.

The concern was about minors, and the remedy was to switch off a platform used overwhelmingly by adults. If the specific worry is what minors are doing over encrypted chat, blocking the whole thing for everyone is a very strange way to go about it.

It didn't even work

The block was merely DNS-level. Anyone who knew how to change their DNS settings was back on Discord in under a minute. Which means the people you'd most want to stop, the techies running the servers you're worried about, were the least inconvenienced. The people who genuinely lost access were the ones who don't know what DNS is (ie the church groups, no shade intended).

It wasn't even applied evenly. Globe and DITO blocked it, while Smart and Converge apparently never did. So whether you lost Discord on Wednesday night came down to which telco you happen to be subscribed to.

A few other things didn’t sit well with me. Twenty-four hours is not a realistic deadline to establish a legal presence in a foreign country. Any company would need time and loads of attorney’s fees to get that done. Reddit got an extension but Discord didn't, which from the outside just looks arbitrary. And there was no court order, no hearing, nor a published standard anyone could have met in advance.

Then again, some folks will say it worked. Discord committed in a day to things it hadn't committed to in a week: a named representative here in the country, so Philippine authorities will have an actual person to serve requests on instead of emailing an office in California, or what the CICC calls a "green lane".

The wake-up call

The truth is that teenagers got hold of a gun and walked into their schools with it.

That's the hard conversation nobody wants, because it lands close to home. Locking a firearm takes a box and a key. Raising a kid who tells you things takes years.

It starts at home. Know your kids. Be the person they come to when something's wrong. Lock up the guns, or ask yourself if you really need one around children.

And as a country, we need to talk seriously about who gets to own firearms and how they're stored.

As with anything, Discord was an easy target. That's why it got hit first.