Online safety & content laws in Dominican Republic (2026)

INDOTEL opened a public consultation (closing 30 January 2026) on a proposed General Law on Telecommunications, Digital Infrastructure and Connectivity to replace the 27-year-old Law 153-98. The draft introduces a sector-specific cybersecurity regime and explicitly extends regulation to fibre, advanced mobile networks, satellite, submarine cables and data centres.

President Abinader presented a revised draft Organic Law on Freedom of Expression and Audiovisual Media to the Senate, proposing the creation of INACOM (National Institute of Communication) as an autonomous digital-platform regulator with transparency and content-moderation obligations. The Dominican Bar Association and press-freedom groups raised concerns about potential censorship and concentration of regulatory power.

The Dominican Republic inaugurated its first formal public-private partnership alliance on cybercrime, bringing together government agencies, the private sector and international bodies including UNODC to share threat intelligence and strengthen victim-support mechanisms for online offences.

The Dominican Republic signed the Second Additional Protocol to the Convention on Cybercrime, enabling direct cross-border cooperation with foreign service providers and real-time subscriber-data sharing for cybercrime investigations. This built on the country's landmark 2013 ratification of the Budapest Convention itself.

President Abinader issued Decree 313-22 adopting the National Cybersecurity Strategy 2030 and its accompanying Action Plan 2022–2024, coordinated by the National Cybersecurity Center. The strategy establishes a whole-of-society framework to protect critical information infrastructure and mandates public-private coordination through 2030.

INDOTEL's Board of Directors approved Resolution 126-2021, imposing baseline cybersecurity obligations on internet service providers operating in the Dominican Republic, requiring technical safeguards to protect network integrity and shield users from network-level threats.

The Dominican Congress enacted Law 172-13, the country's comprehensive personal-data protection statute, granting data subjects rights of access, rectification and deletion and imposing obligations of legality, purpose limitation and security on public and private data controllers. It is the primary domestic framework governing online data processing and underpins all subsequent data-protection guidance.

The Dominican Republic became the first country in Latin America and the Caribbean to ratify the Council of Europe's Convention on Cybercrime (Budapest Convention), formally aligning Law 53-07 with international standards and committing to mutual legal assistance with all State Parties on cybercrime investigations.

Law 53-07 became the Dominican Republic's principal cybercrime statute, criminalising illegal system access, data interception and alteration, identity theft, electronic fraud, online child sexual abuse material and telecommunications sabotage, with custodial sentences up to seven years. It also created the Inter-Institutional Commission against High Technology Crimes (CICDAT) and provided the legal basis for the specialist DICAT police unit and the PEDATEC cyber-prosecution service.

Law 126-02 granted legal validity to electronic transactions, digital documents and digital signatures, assigned INDOTEL oversight of certification service providers and created the regulatory basis for e-commerce in the Dominican Republic. Implementing Decree 335-03 (April 2003) and INDOTEL Resolution 071-19 (2019) later operationalised trust-service requirements.