Russian court slaps $20 decillion fine on Google: report

MOSCOW: Google has been fined a staggering 20 decillion dollars by a Russian court — more than all the money in the world, according to international media reports.

The tech giant is facing claims from 17 Russian TV channels after banning their accounts on YouTube, which it owns, as a result of international sanctions. Pro-Kremlin channels involved in the case reportedly include Russia 1 and the platform belonging to Russia Today presenter and Putin mouthpiece Margarita Simonyan.

A Moscow judge described the legal battle as ‘a case in which there are many, many zeros’, according to news outlet RBC. The broadcaster reports that the amount of the fine has doubled every week since 2020 and is now up to the equivalentof$20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

Google’s recently released interim report for the third quarter shows its total revenue is 88.2 billion dollars — a long way off even thinking about paying the extortionate sum. The penalty also eclipses Google’s $2-trillion market value by a long chalk. Meanwhile, the World Bank estimates the size of the global economy to be around 100 trillion dollars, or 100 followed by 12 zeros. That figure is at least 20 zeros too little to reach the astronomical Russian fine.

Google closed down its Russian division in 2022 following Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Its Russian subsidiary, Google LLC, declared bankruptcy, but many of its services including its search engine and YouTube have remained accessible to Russians.

While the Kremlin has banned some platforms including Twitter and Facebook, it has so far stopped short of blocking access to Google’s services. Google has continued to face pressure however for both failing to delete content Moscow deems illegal and restricting access to some Russian media on YouTube. The video streaming site has banned a number of pro-Moscow pages, including propaganda channel Tsargrad TV, owned by oligarch Konstantin Malofeev.

Google was fined a daily penalty of 100,000 rubles and warned that amount would double every 24 hours if it was not paid. In Russian currency, the fine now amounts to more than 2 undecillion rubles, a 36-digit figure, lawyer Ivan Morozov told the state-owned TASS news agency. Despite the dizzying sums being demanded by judges in Moscow, Google has remained defiant. The company said in its last earnings statement: “We do not believe these ongoing legal matters will have a material adverse effect.”