Since early July, the Communications Committee in the Egyptian parliament has been considering a draft bill to levy taxes on advertisements carried by Google and social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, in an effort to secure “tax returns for the public budget.” This proposal was preceded by a lawsuit brought by an Egyptian lawyer, Mohamed Hamid Salim, who called for social media activity in Egypt to be suspended, particularly that of Facebook, to compel them to acquire a license to operate in Egypt and to obtain tax revenue from their advertisements.

Mustafa Bakri, a member of the Egyptian House of Representatives and one of the project’s supporters, said in a phone interview with Al-Monitor, “The principle goal behind passing this draft is to increase the resources of the public budget through applying Article 60 of Stamp Duty Act 111 of 1968, which was modified in 2008 and compels the state to levy Stamp taxes on private advertisements on television, satellite networks and the internet.” He said these laws are applied in many nations, such as Britain and Israel, and they have sought over the last few years to increase their economic resources through the successful application of these laws.

Article 60 of this act grants the state the right to impose a tax on advertisements equivalent to 15% of their costs. This includes advertisements on movie billboards or broadcasts over the radio, and which are disseminated via public roads or building facades. The same applies to advertisements carried on material printed and distributed inside Egypt, including newspapers, magazines, annual calendars, guidebooks, periodicals of all sorts and advertisements broadcast on satellite channels, the internet and various broadcast cables.

Bakri said, “Neglecting to apply this law would amount to wasting public funds, and the lion’s share of responsibility for this waste falls on the finance minister, who has failed to include these companies on the list of tax paying [entities]." He stressed that the law's application bears no relationship to controlling the content displayed by these ads or imposing any additional burden on the user, and that the main goal behind this was purely to serve the country's economic interests.