Russian Court has fined Google an eye-popping 20 undecillion rubles ($2.5 decillion) for removing Russian state-run and government YouTube channels in the wake of the country’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
In other words, Google faces a $2.5 trillion trillion trillion bill from the country. That figure is $2,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
Russian news agency TASS reported that Google owes Russia a 36-figure sum for violating the country’s administrative offenses code by banning YouTube channels.
The report added that if Google fails to pay the fine within nine months, it will double every day thereafter, with no upper limit to the final figure. Google will be locked out of Russia until it pays the fine.
Russian news outlet RBC first reported on Tuesday that a Russian judge was considering “a case in which there are many, many zeros” after calculating the value of claims brought by 17 YouTube channels against the tech giant.
In its Q2 2024 report, Google acknowledged the pressures it had faced from Russian authorities.
“For example, civil judgments that include compounding penalties have been imposed upon us in connection with disputes regarding the termination of accounts, including those of sanctioned parties. We do not believe these ongoing legal matters will have a material adverse effect,” the company said.
A private complaint was placed with authorities in 2021 when the Tsargrad TV channel and RIA FAN were blocked from YouTube owing to U.S. sanctions. However, it became a state matter when Google blocked the Russian state news agencies RT and Sputnik after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.
Even if it were inclined to accept the dubious judgment from Russian authorities, Google, which has a market value of $2.24 trillion, would obviously be unable to pay even a sliver of the fine. The company generated $73.7 billion in profit globally last year.
Based on those profits, it would take Google 33.8 quintillion years to pay the current fine, a period that will continue to double in length the longer the fine is unpaid.
The fine also dwarfs the entire value of the global economy, which stands at around $105 trillion.
In a post on X, Nigel Gould-Davies, senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, described the sum as “an insane number,” explaining it was equivalent to “1.9 x 10 to the 15 times greater than current global GDP.”
“About 5 x 10 to the 12 days have passed since the start of the universe,” he wrote.
“So even if Google gave Russia everything the world produced this year, every day since the universe began, it would only have paid about 3% of this fine.”
In October 2023, Google’s Russian subsidiary was recognized as bankrupt by a Moscow court. The company had initially filed for bankruptcy in the summer of 2022 after Russian authorities seized its bank account, meaning it couldn’t pay staff or vendors.
Not only does the figure eclipse Google’s $2 trillion market value, but it’s also far larger than the size of the entire global economy, which the International Monetary Fund puts at around $110 trillion — a figure with a mere 13 zeros.
That said, at least the fine is not as large as a googol, which has 100 zeroes. Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin picked the number as the name of the search engine they then hoped would organize large quantities of information.
“Although it is a specific amount, I cannot even say this number, it is rather filled with symbolism,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Thursday when asked by NBC News how Google was expected to pay such a large sum.
“The company should not restrict our broadcasters on their platform,” he added, on his daily briefing call with reporters. “This should be a reason for the Google leadership to pay attention to this and improve the situation.”
The amount the court says Google owes is growing, too.
While the case was first opened in 2020, when Google blocked channels that then belonged to Wagner Group mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhinand oligarch Konstantin Malofeev, it was expanded when YouTube banned further channels after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
The court ordered Google to restore the accounts within nine months, with a fine of 100,000 rubles (around $1,000) levied for each day after that period. The size of the fine was to double each week for every week of noncompliance, with no limit on its size, RBC said.
Some of those Russian media outlets have also appealed to courts in Turkey, Hungary, Spain and South Africa to enforce court decisions made against Google in Russia. In June, South Africa’s High Court granted a motion to seize some of Google’s assets in that country.
Shares in Google parent-company Alphabet ticked down 1.2% in premarket trading, after closing almost 3% higher Wednesday when the company released quarterly earnings that were received well by investors.
The country has put pressure on Google over what Moscow views as illegal content. However, Russia has not yet blocked the use of Google among its citizens.
