A Russian court recently ordered Google to pay a mind-boggling $20 decillion in fines (that’s a number with 33 zeros) to Russian media networks. This fine is because Google blocked Russian TV channels on YouTube, and the amount could still increase.
To put this in perspective, this fine is way beyond what’s possible to pay—it’s even much higher than the entire world’s economy, which is around $100 trillion. The fine has grown this large after a legal case in Russia that started more than four years ago.
The lawyer Ivan Morozov told the Russian news outlet TASS that Google was found guilty under a Russian law for removing these channels and has now been ordered to put them back.
This fine of 2 undecillion rubles, or about $20 decillion, is massive. For context, the world’s economy is only about $105 trillion. This makes the fine almost unimaginable.
According to the UBS “Global Wealth Report 2023,” the total net private wealth reached $454.4 trillion by the end of 2022.
According to British tech site The Register, this fine came after four years of legal fighting. It all started in 2020, when YouTube blocked an ultra-nationalist Russian channel called Tsargrad, following U.S. sanctions against the channel’s owner.
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