Why legislating technology is a bad idea

DECODED: TECH, TRUTH, AND THREATS

By Art Samaniego

Senator Bam Aquino’s proposal to “Blockchain the Budget” has stirred interest in the tech and policy circles. The idea is simple: use blockchain to make government spending transparent and tamper-proof.

It sounds appealing, especially in a country where tracking public funds often feels impossible. But the problem lies not in the goal, it’s in the method. When lawmakers starts legislating specific technologies, it risks hard-coding today’s tools into tomorrow’s problems.

The intention behind Aquino’s bill is good. Blockchain can, in theory, record transactions that cannot be easily altered or tampered with. In practice, though, the technology is still evolving. There are various types of blockchains, each with its own set of rules, governance, and vulnerabilities. Writing one of these into law means locking the government to a system that could soon be outdated, inefficient, or incompatible with future platforms.

We’ve seen this before. The Cybercrime Prevention Act, passed in 2012, tried to regulate the internet based on what it looked like at the time. It failed to anticipate the changes in social media, online security, and data privacy. More than a decade later, we are still dealing with the gaps and overreach of that law.

Technology should inform legislation, but it should not be legislated. The Senate’s role is to create enduring policy, not to choose which programming language or system architecture the government must use. Laws should focus on values such as transparency, accountability, and traceability, not the particular tools that deliver them.

If the goal is to make the national budget transparent, then the law should require open data standards, public dashboards, and audit trails that any technology can support. Let experts and engineers decide whether blockchain, or whatever comes after it, is the best fit.

When the government writes technology into law, it traps progress at a single point in time. Technology moves fast, but laws move slowly. If we’re serious about digital governance, we should legislate principles that last, not platforms that expire.