Including this, Google has racked up some 2 undecillion rubles ($2.5 decillion) worth of fines within Russia after refusing to reinstate accounts of pro-Kremlin and state-run media outlets for years. According to the RBC news website, on October 29, a source close to court rulings against the tech company cited this.
According to sources at RBC, Google started incurring daily fines of 100,000 rubles after 2020 when pro-government media outlets Tsargrad and RIA FAN won court cases against the company over blocked YouTube channels. The daily fines have since doubled each week to reach an overall sum of about 2 trillion rubles.
An undecillion is equal to 1, followed by 36 zeros. Google itself, whose parent company Alphabet reported more than $307 billion in revenue for the third quarter of 2023 alone, would never pay the astronomically high fine the report provided further details of.
Details of the legal claim against Google According to the source, 17 Russian TV channels have filed a lawsuit against Google with RBC. The applicants include state-run Channel One, military-affiliated Zvezda broadcaster, and a company representing RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan.
YouTube, owned by Google, blocked several Russian state-run media outlets for backing Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In response, the authorities in Moscow imposed fines on the service but refrained from blocking the site.
This summer, Google’s Russian subsidiary filed for bankruptcy and was declared bankrupt last fall. Alphabet Inc’s Google had earlier paused advertising in Russia as it struggled to comply with Western sanctions over the war in Ukraine.
The trending legal fight shows how tensions between the largest tech companies in the Western world and the government of Russia are still boiling, as the latter is trying to demand at least a certain level of control over online narratives.
The unprecedented fines indicate to other global firms the consequences of not complying with state orders in world geopolitics. As events unfold, it will be interesting to see the modus operandi of both sides in this complex battle.
