A Statute Already Built for Expansion
Egypt's Anti-Cyber and Information Technology Crimes Law — Law No. 175 of 2018 — was ratified by President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and registered with WIPO's international legal database as a broad framework covering hacking, data retention, and website blocking on national-security or economic grounds. Eight years on, parliament's Communications and Information Technology Committee is trying to bolt three new categories onto that frame: online betting, cyber extortion, and "rumours." Committee chair Ahmed Badawi said the government would submit the amendments after Eid al-Adha this June. As of late June, per Badawi's own account, no draft had reached the parliamentary calendar — a modest but telling failure for a bill billed as urgent public-safety legislation.
The Betting Case Is the Easy One
Start with the least controversial part of the package. Egyptian law has banned gambling for citizens for decades — the Penal Code criminalizes it, the Civil Code voids gambling contracts, and only foreign passport-holders may legally play in licensed hotel casinos. What the 2018 cybercrime law never anticipated was an app economy: platforms like 1xBet and MelBet marketed aggressively to Egyptian users through social media influencers. Badawi has said accounts tied to betting apps "exceeded 20 million," concentrated in Upper Egypt and rural governorates, and blamed the platforms for serious financial and social harm to families. The National Telecommunications Regulatory Authority, acting on the committee's recommendations, has already blocked roughly 80% of the identified betting apps — including 1xBet, pulled from app stores in 2024, and more recently MelBet — without waiting for any new statute.
A separate bill from MP Martha Mahrous, tabled in January 2025, would formalize enforcement with a tiered penalty schedule: platform operators and sponsors facing two to five years and fines of EGP 5–10 million; intermediaries two to five years and EGP 1–5 million; payment facilitators up to six months and EGP 50,000–200,000. Badawi's government-side amendment goes further, allowing life imprisonment where organized criminal networks or large-scale fraud are involved.
Where the Case Weakens
This is, on the merits, defensible policy. A state has a legitimate interest in enforcing an existing gambling prohibition against platforms explicitly engineered to route around it, and predatory, youth-targeted design by unlicensed offshore operators is a measurable harm, not a hypothetical one. But the life-imprisonment ceiling strains proportionality. Egypt already has two-to-ten-year sentencing bands and fines running into the millions of pounds under the Mahrous framework — more than sufficient deterrence for financial crime of this kind. Reserving the same maximum sentence used for terrorism and premeditated murder for a betting-app operator reads as political theater more than calibrated criminal justice. Once life imprisonment sits in statute for a broadly defined "electronic gambling" offense, it becomes a lever prosecutors can point at any inconvenient platform, not just organized fraud rings.
"Climate of Despair" Is Where the Bill Turns
The betting provisions are this amendment's Trojan horse. Bundled into the same package is language criminalizing online "rumours" intended to spread false information or create what Badawi has described as "a climate of despair" in the public sphere. That standard has no fixed legal meaning — it is a mood, not a fact pattern — and Egypt's record with vague speech offenses gives little reason for confidence in restrained enforcement. The 2018 law's blocking powers already let investigators shut down any site whose content is deemed to threaten national security or damage the economy; layering a subjective "despair" trigger on top hands prosecutors a second, even looser hook against journalists, satirists, and ordinary social media users covering anything from currency depreciation to public-service failures. Parliament has, in parallel, been holding hearings — seven so far — on a separate bill regulating children's social media use, suggesting an appetite for broad platform-level intervention well beyond gambling.
The honest case for a rumours provision is that disinformation causes real harm — bank-run panics or health misinformation are genuine governance problems. But the fix is a narrowly drawn falsity-plus-harm-plus-intent standard tested in court, not an undefined emotional register written directly into a statute that already carries life-sentence exposure elsewhere in the same bill.
The Delay Is the One Safeguard Currently Working
The most interesting fact in this story may be the stall itself. NTRA and Egypt's media regulator have not waited for legislation to act — the bulk of flagged betting apps are already blocked under existing authority. That gap between aggressive administrative enforcement and a slow-moving legislative process is not new for Egypt, but it means the "rumours" provision, the amendment's most speech-restrictive element, currently has no legal force at all. For publishers, platforms, and ordinary Egyptian internet users, a stalled parliament is, for now, doing more to protect expression than anything written into the bill itself. Lawmakers should use the delay to split the package — advancing the betting provisions on their existing legal basis while sending the "rumours" clause back for a narrower rewrite, rather than letting urgency around gambling fraud carry a vague speech offense into force by association.