A Russian court has fined Google $20 decillion (£15.4 decillion), which is a 20 with 33 zeros, a figure that vastly exceeds the world’s combined wealth. There are not 20 decillion grains of sand on Earth or stars visible in the sky.
The penalty is a culmination of a four-year court case that started with the Google-owned YouTube banning the ultra-nationalist Russian channel Tsargrad because of United States sanctions in 2020.
The court imposed a fine of 100,000 roubles ($1,025) per day, which doubles every week, reaching the eye-watering number of two undecillion roubles, which converts to $20 decillion.
The fine came as Google reported its quarterly earnings on Tuesday, which came in at $88.3 billion for the three months until September. Paying off the fine could take the company 56.65 septillion years, which is more than 4 trillion times the age of the universe.
Google did not react to the judgment but has previously said that courts in Russia “have been weaponised to support Russia’s efforts to undermine US sanctions”.
Google shut down its Russian division in 2022 after the Ukraine invasion and its subsidiary declared bankruptcy. YouTube is not officially blocked in the country but its availability is sporadic. The Russian companies are seeking to use international courts to chase Google for its assets, filing lawsuits in the US, England and South Africa.
According to Bloomberg, lawyers for the Russian companies said in a US filing: “An old Russian proverb states, if you’re afraid of wolves, don’t go into the forest. For Google the proverb might well read, if you’re afraid of the Russian legal system, don’t do business in Russia.”
Google is trying to thwart those efforts and has received judgments in the US and English courts temporarily blocking Tsargrad and the Russian broadcasters RT and NFPT.
It emerged this year that Russian bailiffs seized $100 million of Google Russia’s assets. In one of the court filings, Google said that the assets were seized “even though the amount purportedly due under the judgment at the time was less than $12.5 million.”
The tech company said that Russia “levied unprecedented fines and arbitrary legal penalties against Google in an attempt to limit access to information on our services and as a punishment for our compliance with international sanctions against Russian individuals and organisations.”
Roman Yankovskiy, an expert at the Russian HSE Institute of Education, believes it is likely that Google will take measures to prohibit Russian companies from advertising on its services in the future.
“The speed of access to Google services — as we already see with YouTube — will be reduced, access could be blocked and so on. As a result of Google’s failure to pay the fines imposed by the Russian Federation … Russian citizens and companies will experience more and more difficulties using the company’s services,” he told the Tass news agency. (The Times)
