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Russian Court Hits Google With a Fine Larger Than the World’s GDP from Daring Fireball RSS feed.
Russian Court Hits Google With a Fine Larger Than the World’s GDP
Joshua Nelken-Zitser, Business Insider:
A legal dispute between Google and Russia over suspended YouTube accounts has led to a fine so large that it exceeds all the money on Earth. Ivan Morozov, a Moscow-based lawyer, told the state-run TASS newswire that a Russian court ordered the tech giant to restore Russian media accounts on YouTube, a Google-owned company.
He said that Google’s failure to do so has resulted in a fine that had been regularly doubling for years. There is no cap on the total, the lawyer said. Morozov, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, said that the cumulative amount has now reached 2 undecillion rubles — an almost unfathomable figure.
At the current exchange rate, the fine is equivalent to about $20.6 decillion. A decillion is a figure followed by 33 zeros — which, in this case, puts the fine at $20,604,600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
This certainly makes the EU’s fines based on a percentage of companies’ global revenue seem fair and reasonable.