Google Will Lose, Russian Fine Is Bigger Than Every Human's Money
HOLIDAY NEWS - Russia fined Google US$20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 or US$20 decillion (33-digit number) after the United States (US) technology giant took action against what it called Vladimir Putin's propaganda.
Lawyer Ivan Morozov said Google had been fined in Russia for removing Russian TV channels from YouTube. However, the size of the fines has ballooned to unprecedented levels over the past 4 years, since a court case began in Russia against the tech giant.
Now the breach has cost the tech giant 2 undecillion rubles. For comparison, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) says global GDP is estimated at YS$110 thousand billion (12-digit figure).
An expert quoted by Russian news agency TASS, Roman Yankovsky, of the HSE Educational Institute, told TASS that Google "clearly will not pay this fine, and the Russian Federation will not be able to recover this money from the company."
A quick calculation showed that he was right. Google's parent company, Alphabet, has a market capitalization of just over US$2 trillion. Even with revenue of US$80.54 billion from the last quarter, the tech giant appears unable to pay the fine.
Any claims made by the Russian government can only be made within the country.
British tech newspaper The Register reported that the figure had been calculated following a four-year court case sparked by YouTube banning the ultra-nationalist Russian channel Tsargrad in 2020 in response to US sanctions imposed on the companyits parent.
Until this news was published, Google had not commented on the fine.