Google faces mounting legal pressure in Russia as the tech giant has now racked up a mind boggling fine, totaling at a whopping $2.5 decillion amid ongoing disputes over its refusal to restore the accounts of pro-Kremlin and Russian media outlets.
According to a report by Russia’s RBC news, the search engine giant is facing claims from 17 Russian TV channels after banning their accounts on its video-sharing platform YouTube, as a result of international sanctions.
As a result, Google was fined a daily penalty of 100,000 rubles and it was also warned that the amount would double every 24 hours if it was not paid.
The report said that the case was first filed privately in 2020 after the accounts of Russia’s Tsargrad TV channel and RIA FAN were blocked due to US sanctions laws.
It then escalated after the start of the Ukraine war when YouTube blocked accounts belonging to the likes of Sputnik and RT after which Russian authorities got involved.
Describing the legal battle, a Moscow judge said that he was dealing with “a case in which there are many, many zeros”, as the amount of the fine has doubled every week since 2020.
In Russian currency, the fine now amounts to over two undecillion rubles, a 36-digit figure, lawyer Ivan Morozov told Russia’s TASS news agency.
The fine is significantly higher than the global gross domestic product, which is estimated at $110 trillion by the International Monetary Fund.
Meanwhile, according to the Daily Mail, Google’s third-quarter interim report revealed a total revenue of $88.2 billion, and the penalty also surpasses the company’s $2 trillion market value, which indicates that it is unlikely to pay the fine any time soon.
While the Kremlin has also banned some platforms including X and Facebook, it has so far stopped short of blocking access to Google’s services.
The company’s Russian subsidiary, Google LLC, declared bankruptcy, but many of its services including its search engine and YouTube have remained accessible to Russians.
Despite the dizzying sums being demanded by judges in Moscow, Google has remained defiant.
In its latest earnings statement, the company said: “We do not believe these ongoing legal matters will have a material adverse effect.”