1996: Internet censorship

Internet censorship started to spark interest among governments and legislators around the world.  The Philippine Senate called for a hearing on pornographic materials on the Internet, and summoned Internet pioneers to testify.  DOST Secretary William Padolina declares that he would rather "err on the side of freedom" when faced with censorship issues.

1995: Ayala Corporation

Companies connecting to the Internet became aware  of their corporate image.  Ayala Corporation - which would rather be a dotcom player - started its website. 

Even while top companies like Ayala Corporation (http://globe.com.ph/~isd/ac_home.htm) got press coverage went online, countless smaller companies have also built an online presence.  Many of these started out as extensions of the personal page built by company staff members who were the first to go online among their peers.
 

1995: G-Spot

Cebu City ISP GSILink puts up G-Spot (http:www.gsilink.com/gspot), the first public Filipino search engine. It indexed keywords from websites using the Open Source software engine, but required users to manually add sites to its catalog.  This showed that Filipinos wanted to look for content located within the country, which could not be satisfied by foreign engines of the time.  No Filipino search engine has been able to do actual indexing of local content, until Google started offering country-specific searches.

1994: ("SCF") soc.culture.filipino

Chuck Gardner puts up the first high profile website, the soc.culture.filipino ("SCF") homepage. It is now located at http://www.cyberbayan.org. This is the home page of the SCF newsgroup. Various Filipino-made web sites started going online showing the potential of Filipino content on the web, and inspired other webmasters to build their own sites.

1993: E-Mail Company

The E-Mail Company launches EMC Online (http://www.emc.com.ph), the first online content service in the Philippines which allows its subscribers to forge a strong and dynamic online community via online chat and forums. This online service originated in the Macintosh platform using the First Class software and was originally run separate from the Internet. Along with the forums system that emerged later on, it promoted a self-contained community where everyone communicates on the same system.

E-Mail Company in 1997