Russia fined Google $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000—that’s 2.5 trillion trillion trillion dollars—after the US tech giant took action against Putin’s propaganda. That’s 2 Followed By 34 Zeroes.
Google has been fined in Russia for removing Russian TV channels from YouTube. The size of the penalty, however, swelled to an unprecedented level over the past 4 years, since the court case started in Russia against the tech giant.
According to lawyer Ivan Morozov, cited by Russian state news agency TASS, the violations cost the tech giant 2 undecillion rubles or $20 decillion (a 34-digit figure).
To put that into perspective, global GDP reaches an estimated $110 thousand billion (12-digit figure), according to the IMF.
Another expert cited by the Russian news agency, Roman Yankovsky, from the HSE Institute of Education, told TASS that Google “clearly will not pay this penalty, and the Russian Federation will not be able to recover this money from the company.”
A short calculation shows that he is right. Google’s holding company, Alphabet, has a market capitalisation of slightly more than $2 trillion. Even with earnings of $80.54 billion (€73.96 billion) from the last quarter, the tech giant doesn’t seem to be able to afford to pay the fine.
Any claims made by the Russian government are only viable domestically.
British tech newspaper The Register reported that the amount has been calculated after a four-year court case which was triggered by YouTube having banned the ultra-nationalist Russian channel Tsargrad in 2020 in response to the US sanctions imposed on its parent company.
Russian propaganda on YouTube
The issue traces back to March 2022, when YouTube announced a global ban on several Russian state-operated channels, including RT and Sputnik. The platform justified its decision by pointing to content policies prohibiting material that denies, minimises, or trivialises violent events.
YouTube has enforced such policies against channels supporting Russia’s narratives around the Ukraine conflict, removing over 1,000 channels and more than 15,000 videos globally. In Europe, restrictions on Russian state media accounts were imposed before the ban expanded worldwide. This action led to backlash from Russia, which views the move as censorship and suppression of its state-sponsored media.
Following the onset of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, Google significantly curtailed its operations within Russia but stopped short of a complete exit. Services like YouTube and Google Search remain accessible within Russian borders.
Unlike some American tech companies that fully withdrew, Google’s partial operations in Russia continue, although its Russia subsidiary filed for bankruptcy several months into the conflict after the Russian government seized its bank accounts.
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