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Google Faces Huge Fines in Russia as Putin Ally Wins Lawsuit (bloomberg.com) 48

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
Alphabet's Google is facing potentially heavy fines in Russia after a court ruled it must unblock the YouTube account of a TV channel owned by a sanctioned ally of President Vladimir Putin. From a report: The Moscow Ninth Arbitration Court of Appeals on Thursday upheld an April ruling that ordered the U.S. technology giant to restore the Tsargrad account or face a daily fine, the channel said in a statement Thursday. Settlement talks between the two sides failed to yield a deal in August. Russia has stepped up confrontation with foreign social media and internet companies in what the government calls a campaign to uphold its digital sovereignty. Regulators have levied fines and slowed content in a bid to force companies including Google and Twitter to delete posts encouraging unauthorized protests and other material deemed illegal. In September, Google and Apple removed a protest-voting app from their Russian stores as parliamentary elections got underway after the authorities threatened to imprison their local staff. Google now faces a daily fine of 100,000 rubles ($1,360), which will double each week that the company refuses to comply. Tsargrad said the court capped the total fine at 1 billion rubles in the first nine months and then it will be allowed to grow further. Under Russian law, there's no upper limit on the potential fines.
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Google Faces Huge Fines in Russia as Putin Ally Wins Lawsuit More

Google Faces Huge Fines in Russia as Putin Ally Wins Lawsuit

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  • can they make the account Russia only?

    • Who to root for? The popcorn salesman! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by shanen ( 462549 ) on Thursday December 16, 2021 @02:40PM (#62087919) Homepage Journal

      What is the intention of your FP? Kind of an interesting solution approach, however.

      But I see it more as a battle of Spy vs. Spy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] Can't figure out which one wears which color in this story.

      However I have to call the advantage as the google's. If the google ain't making any profit from Russia, then no reason not to pull the plug. Let Russia use Bing. That should take Putin back to the Stone Age!

      • Force all advertising transactions for Russia to take place in other jurisdictions. Then provide as free service again in Russia and do what you want. If they try to block IP then so be it. :/

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by shanen ( 462549 )

          Interesting solution approach. I'm frankly surprised that Russia doesn't already have a Great Firewall like China's.

          But I still can't imagine that the google's advertising revenue from Russia amounts to a hill of beans. I'd be surprised if it was a molehill, and cheap beans even in that case.

    • Re:can they make the account Russia only? (Score:4, Informative)

      by aerogems ( 339274 ) on Thursday December 16, 2021 @03:27PM (#62088157)

      Probably wouldn't matter. The FCPA in the US is a pretty broad law that covers virtually anything someone wants it to. If someone is on a sanctions list in the US it wouldn't necessarily matter if they made it only accessible in Russia, they could still potentially be charged under the FCPA. Whether or not some prosecutor would do so is kind of the question.

      Best bet would be some idiot red state AG filing a lawsuit as part of some "anti-big tech" crusade, but the problem is Russia's been funneling money into a lot of their campaigns for years using various proxies and intermediaries, not to mention they have their troll farms keeping the base agitated. All things they know full well, just pretend like they don't. Is it worth risking the wrath of Russia which could set it's troll farms to support Democrats in the next two election cycles just to score a symbolic victory that most people would forget about in less than a month? Pre-Trump I would have said no, but post-Trump there are some people in elected office who are literally psychotic in that they are completely divorced from reality, it's not just an act they put on for the gullible.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by dbialac ( 320955 )
        Ugh. Russia funnels money into both parties. Their goal is to discredit elections in general. As such, they try their best to make it easy to discover and they've been doing it since at least the JFK election. They aren't pro-Demorcrat and they aren't pro-Republican.
    • Just unblock it and only allow a few 180x120 streams at a time.
    • Technically yes.

      Legally per normal internation law and its interpretation - yes.

      Really - no. USA as per the ideas of the Congress and House as well as the interpretation of the 14th amendment by the courts has the idea that it's laws apply universally. Tsargrad is under sanctions on some trumped up and sucked out of a finger pre-text which has nothing to do with reality. These sanctions are universal as far as USA legal system is concerned. Even if the account was on Uranus, USA sanctions still apply.

  • Let's see Russia come up with their own search engine and video streaming content provider.

  • A loss for freedom of speech.

  • ... is about USD $13 million.

    I'd guess Russia will have to go higher than that to get Google to budge, that's .. .just not that much money.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Hodr ( 219920 )

      EU says "Look at these joker's over there, forgot 4 zeroes on their fine."

      • Well, the per week doubling makes it quite the opposite of harmless. Remember the chessboard reward fable, let this go for a year and the fine is all the way up at 5 million trillion dollars. Something that Google will not be able to pay. I don't think the EU thought of that, wish they had.
  • Can you pay in the form of wheat grains on a chessboard?

  • Nationalism will destroy humanity. Nationalism is anti-human. Before war comes nationalism.

    • The world isn't ready to recognize nationalism as a problem. A tangent is needed to understand why.

      It hasn't dawned on anyone how recently we moved into modern culture via technology. In 1910, about 9% of US kids graduated high school. That's 4-5 generations (blink of an eye in time).

      As well, we base this completely different society on traditions and beliefs that no longer make sense, they required lots of children (so a couple would survive) and lots of farming. Religion is the opiate of the masses (t

  • That's peanuts for Google.

  • Pull out (Score:3)

    by Artem S. Tashkinov ( 764309 ) on Thursday December 16, 2021 @06:54PM (#62088825) Homepage
    I for one am looking forward to YouTube pulling out of Russia ... completely. The West has been looking for ways to overthrow the current mafia regime but their sanctions so far have been largely ineffective and ultimately bad as they have led to the general population becoming poorer while the richest and the friends of the czar haven't really noticed. YouTube while pulling out of Russia could really piss people off and get them to start fighting the regime.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by amiwho ( 9132605 )
      That's how sanctions works, i.e. impoverish the people so that they rebel. Sanctions never impacts the leaders (even when applied to democratic countries like ours) because the leaders are paid by the state and decide their own wages. Sanctioning a country like Russia is counter-productive however because the country is mostly self-sufficient for pretty much everything (energy, food, technology, etc). Worse: some of the sanctions allows Russian companies to be created and grow without foreign competition.

      • the country is mostly self-sufficient for pretty much everything (energy, food, technology, etc).

        It is self-sufficient only in terms of energy. A ton of things are imported or produced using foreign technology. This is directly confirmed by the fact that whenever the Russian ruble falls against the U.S. dollar, almost everything in the country becomes expensive almost in the same proportion if not more.

        Source: I live here. Too lazy to look for confirmations in the media.

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