Philippine authorities confirmed Tuesday that Roblox will not be blocked in the country, with the gaming platform responding by announcing a set of stricter measures aimed at protecting young users — a significant turn in a weeks-long standoff over child safety on the platform.
The Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) and the Cybercrime Investigation and Coordinating Center (CICC) made the clarification during their face-to-face meeting with Roblox executives in Manila, which opened the first of three scheduled days of talks. The no-ban position from the two agencies aligned with what officials had signaled earlier. “We are not for banning. We are for stricter regulations and child safety,” CICC Undersecretary Renato “Aboy” Paraiso had said ahead of the discussions.
The meeting capped a tense three-week period that began on March 20 when the CICC placed Roblox under strict monitoring after reports emerged of pedophiles, drug traffickers, and other criminal actors using the platform to target Filipino minors. A compliance window initially set at 30 days was cut to 15, with an April 10 enforcement deadline set for the company to meet government demands or face a nationwide block coordinated through local telecommunications companies and app store restrictions.
The pressure on Roblox was compounded by a specific incident that shook public confidence in the platform: Philippine police foiled an alleged plot by seven teenagers in Laguna to carry out a school shooting, with authorities saying the suspects had been manipulated by foreign handlers who reached them through Roblox.
Going into this week’s talks, the CICC had framed its demands as non-negotiable. Roblox was required to register as a legal entity and open a physical office in the Philippines, connect its age verification system to the Philippine Identification System (PhilSys) instead of relying on self-declared ages or facial recognition, and commit to sharing user data with law enforcement — subject to court orders and subpoenas — to help identify and prosecute predators operating within the platform.
Paraiso had made the government’s posture unmistakably clear before the meetings. “Even before you come here, I would tell you now that your safeguards and your guarantees are insufficient to protect our Filipino children,” he said. “So if you’re coming here to convince us to agree to your policies and guidelines, it’s a waste of effort. You come here to have a dialogue with the Philippine government, through the DICT and the CICC, to reform your platform and to safeguard our Filipino children.”
The CICC had also pointed to a test conducted by a local tech journalist who bypassed Roblox’s age verification to register a profile for a seven-year-old child and gain access to mature content — an experiment officials cited as evidence that the platform’s safeguards were not just inadequate in policy, but failing in practice.
The government rejected arguments from the local Roblox developer community that the risk was statistically minor. Figures presented at a March 31 stakeholder consultation showed approximately 24,552 exploitation cases recorded globally against roughly 382 million monthly active users — a fraction of a percent. Paraiso dismissed the framing. “When it comes to child safety, we do not go by statistics,” he said. “One child that gets sexually exploited, one child that gets victimized is enough for government to step in.”
The stakes for Roblox’s continued presence in the Philippines are significant. DICT Secretary Henry Aguda had noted the platform carries an estimated six million daily active users in the country, with revenues potentially reaching PHP 8.5 billion a month from the local market — a figure the agency said it planned to verify directly with the company during the Manila meetings.
Senator Risa Hontiveros separately filed Senate Resolution No. 357 calling for a legislative inquiry into Roblox and comparable online gaming platforms, with her office’s legal counsel pressing for amendments that would require foreign platforms to maintain a resident legal representative as a precondition for operating in the Philippines.
