No, Russia didn’t hit Google with a $23 million fined. It fined Google the equivalent of 23,809,523 times all of the money that exists on Earth. The Kremlin slapped Google with a $2.5 decillion fine, according to The Moscow Times. That’s $2,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 or for the nerds among us, 2.5 × 1021. Yes, I had to pull out the scientific notation just to wrap my head around the number.
In probably the grossest example of an understatement of all time, The Moscow Times says that Google is “unlikely to ever pay the incredibly high fine,” noting that Google parent company Alphabet reported revenue of just $307 billion last year. I guess when we’re dealing with phony numbers that have no right to exist, 307 billion really doesn’t seem like much.
The burning question — why? State-run media, of course. In response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, YouTube blocked several Russian news accounts, including Channel One, Moscow Media, and Public Television of Russia. A Russian court ordered Google to restore the accounts and imposed a fine of $1,029 — or 100,000 rubles — every day that Google kept the channels down. That number doubled every week that Google kept the channels down, according to RBC.
Things have clearly snowballed since then, with exponential growth showing up in the nastiest way to create the monstrosity of a number that Google now owes, according to the Russian government. That money will never show up, of course, considering it’s astronomically larger than the $105 trillion or so that makes up the gross domestic product (GDP) of the entire planet, but its fine will only continue to grow over time. Clearly, Google isn’t interested in paying it, and it probably never plans to.
Google has almost entirely pulled out of Russia, in fact, with the Russian subsidiary of the company declaring bankruptcy more than a year ago.
Still, Russian media that originally sued Google are trying to get the company to cough up some sort of fine. RBC reports that Russian media companies have filed lawsuits against Google in Spain, South Africa, Turkey, and Hungary to enforce the Russian fine, and earlier this year, South Africa actually granted a motion to seize Google’s assets in the country. Google has responded with lawsuits in the U.S. and U.K. in order to keep these Russian lawsuits confined to, well, Russia.
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