As any lawyer will tell you, a law doesn’t necessarily have to make sense, or be in any way enforceable, to be on the books.
Following some legal back-and-forth resulting from the restrictions of Russian media channels on YouTube, a Russian court has presented Google with a fine of 2 undecillion rubles. That’s approximately 20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 US dollars.
As The Register points out, this is a ludicrous amount of money. It’s about 200 trillion times the current estimated amount of “liquid” monetary value, in all currencies from all countries, currently in circulation on the planet. (I think I got that right. It’s a lot of zeroes.) The total was apparently reached after accounting for 17 Russian TV channels that were removed from YouTube following US sanctions in 2020, which have only been expanded since the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The fine starts as 100,000 rubles for each day that Google keeps said channels restricted, and doubles for every week of non-compliance. There is no upper limit on the fine, and even an elementary school student could see how this quickly gets out of hand.
According to a machine translation of the original news story on RBC.ru, Google’s Russian subsidiary has been effectively bankrupt since 2022. While several billion rubles have been paid in fines for similar actions, Google’s assets in Russia are already so far in the red that getting anything meaningfully valuable out of the company is near impossible.
Google deactivated AdSense accounts in Russia in August, effectively shutting the American company out of the territory for its core business. Google-owned websites like Google Search and YouTube are still available to Russian residents, as are Chrome, Android-based devices, and plenty of other products. But Russians are noticing severe slowdowns as Google’s infrastructure across the region is essentially abandoned and local competitors like Yandex are trying to move into the vacuum.
While the initial blocking of content was definitely inspired by US sanctions and a general crackdown on attempts by Russian state-controlled media to influence other countries, it’s worth noting that Russia isn’t exactly doing itself any favors when it comes to giving foreign companies access to its economic space. In March, Russia passed a new law that banned online advertising from “foreign agents,” which includes pretty much anything that Russian leaders consider “anti-Kremlin.”
