Egypt's parliament is finalizing the first major rewrite of Law No. 175 of 2018, the Anti-Cyber and Information Technology Crimes Law, since it was enacted eight years ago. MP Ahmed Badawi, who chairs the House Communications and Information Technology Committee, has said the government will submit amendments after Eid al-Adha that criminalize online betting applications, expand cyber extortion provisions, and target the "spread of false information" and rumours online. A separate draft law regulating children's social media use — following seven parliamentary hearings — is moving on a parallel track.
The Case for the Bundle
Start with the strongest version of the government's argument, because parts of it are genuinely sound. Egypt's existing law never anticipated the current wave of offshore betting apps, and Badawi has cited a real enforcement gap: authorities say they are already blocking roughly 80% of online betting applications through the National Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (NTRA) and the Supreme Council for Media Regulation, but without explicit statutory criminalization, prosecutors are left stretching general fraud provisions to fit a specific, fast-growing problem. The proposed penalty structure — two to five years and fines up to EGP5 million for betting agents, up to six months for payment facilitators, and two to five years plus fines up to EGP10 million for platform operators, rising to life imprisonment where organized criminal networks are involved — is a proportionate, tiered response to a real harm, not an overreach. Cyber extortion, similarly, is an underspecified crime in the 2018 text and deserves clearer statutory footing.
The Clause That Should Worry Everyone
The problem is what's riding alongside those fixes. Badawi has described the false-information provisions as targeting rumours that create "a climate of despair" in the public sphere — a standard so elastic it could describe almost any unwelcome reporting on the economy, public health, or a natural disaster. Egypt does not need a hypothetical to worry about how such language gets used. The 2018 law already contains national-security-based website-blocking powers that Freedom House's Freedom on the Net 2024 report describes as "vaguely defined," and Egypt's existing legal framework for "false news" has already produced real prosecutions: researcher and rights advocate Patrick George Zaki was sentenced to three years in prison on charges of spreading false news after publishing an article on discrimination against Coptic Christians, before receiving a presidential pardon days later. Egypt currently scores 28 out of 100 — "Not Free" — on Freedom House's internet freedom index. Layering a new, broader rumours provision onto that baseline, in the same bill as legitimate fraud provisions, is how a defensible consumer-protection law becomes a vehicle for something else entirely.
Bundling Is the Tell
This is not a hypothetical concern about legislative drafting — it's a pattern. When a genuinely popular measure (cracking down on gambling apps that Egyptian families have publicly complained about) is packaged with a vague speech provision in the same bill, opposition to the speech clause becomes politically costly: lawmakers who vote no risk being cast as soft on fraud, not as defenders of due process. Egypt's parliament would serve both goals better by decoupling them — passing the betting and extortion provisions, which have clear evidentiary standards and specific criminal conduct, while sending the false-information language back for a rewrite that ties liability to actual, provable harm (incitement to violence, fraud, defamation with malice) rather than a subjective "climate of despair" standard that a prosecutor and a critic will read very differently.
Children's Social Media: A More Defensible Draft, Same Risk
The parallel children's social media law is better constructed on paper. It would require platforms to maintain a local legal representative, adopt a unified age-classification system, and build in parental controls — provisions that track approaches already underway in the EU and Australia, and that pair with NTRA's already-launched "child-safe SIM" services (Etmaen and Etmaen Ala El Akher), which block age-inappropriate content by default. That is a reasonable, internationally consistent starting point. The risk is enforcement discretion: a "local legal representative" requirement is only as protective of speech as the body that decides when to invoke it, and if that decision sits with the same regulatory apparatus empowered by the rumours clause, platform compliance teams will over-remove content to avoid legal exposure — the same chilling dynamic Freedom House documents journalists already practicing around sensitive topics.
What Proportionate Would Look Like
None of this requires abandoning the legitimate parts of the package. A betting-app crackdown with clear, tiered penalties is good policy; a children's online-safety framework with age verification and local accountability is good policy. What proportionate regulation requires is narrowing the false-information provision to specific, provable conduct, adding judicial (not just administrative) review before content is blocked under it, and — ideally — passing it as separate legislation from the betting and child-safety measures so each can be judged, and amended, on its own merits. Parliament has the votes and the public mandate to do the popular parts of this bill well. The rumours clause is where that mandate runs out.