Russian Court Fines Google $2.5 Decillion Over Refusals to Reinstate Pro-Kremlin Accounts

A Russian court has fined Google 2 decillion Russian rubles ($2.5 decillion) for refusing to reinstate more than a dozen pro-Kremlin accounts on Google’s subsidiary YouTube.

The fine has snowballed into the amount since 2020, when a Russian court ruled that failure to reinstate the channels nine months after the court decision would amount to a fine of 100,000 rubles ($1,030) daily, an amount that doubles weekly.

For reference, a decillion contains 33 zeros, and the Kremlin-imposed fine is equivalent to 9.2 sextillion times the world’s richest person, Elon Musk’s, $270 billion net worth, or 312.5 quintillion times Russia’s gross domestic product (GDP) of $8 trillion in 2023.

As RBC Russia reported, the court claims were made by 17 Russian television channels whose YouTube channels have been suspended since 2020. A source told the publication that Google paid 1 billion Russian rubles ($10 million) in 2022 to one of the original claimants in 2020.

Google’s subsidiary filed for bankruptcy in the summer 2022, a decision recognized by a Moscow court in October of that year.

Despite the astronomical fines, Moscow has stopped short of blocking access to Google in Russia despite persistent rumors that it will.

On Aug. 12, advertising service Google AdSense shut down its operations in Russia, where content creators would “no longer be able to receive monetization income.”

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Earlier, in March, the Kremlin fined Google for not restricting access to some prohibited content on YouTube.