Russia fines Google something like a ‘zillion’ dollars for blocking YouTube accounts

A Moscow judge fines Google ‘2 undecillion rubles’ for blocking Russian TV YouTube accounts – an amount with so many zeros, you’d have to be a scholar mathematician to even calculate it.

It’s a court case involving over a dozen Russian television stations, most of them controlled by the state of course, all for blocking access to the TV channel's own accounts on YouTube.

It seems the 17 Russian channels decided they had enough of Google’s dis, and decided to take the entire matter up in Russian courts, as reported by Moscow-based news outlet RBC.

In what seems like a global PR campaign to drum up some much-needed attention to their plight, a judge hearing the case on Monday, October 28th, fined the tech behemoth a whopping ₽2 undecillion (2 undecillion rubles).

The enormous (and ridiculous) number known as undecillion is 36 zeros tacked on the number one, according to an advice blog by PrepScholar. This makes Google's penalty calculated in US dollars as $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

The Russian court said it had imposed the fine on Google, which owns YouTube because the company failed to comply with a ruling by Russia’s Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) to restore the Russian media accounts, RBC reported.

Google had blocked access to the video hosting service back in 2020, in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The court order to restore the YouTube accounts or be financially penalized was handed down in 2022, which included a “fine of 100 thousand ruble charge for each day of non-compliance, to double every week until the decision is implemented, with no limit on the total amount of the fine,” RBC said.

The case which has been ongoing since 2022, has resulted in Google’s Russian legal entity, Google LLC, to pay a partial 1 million ruble payment to the courts. Since then Google LLC has declared bankruptcy.

Russia, looking to collect on the courts ruling, has put pressure on various other countries to seize Google's assets to pay the fines, with South Africa being the first to grant the motion.

Google has since filed an injunction against the order in an attempt to block Russia from initiating legal proceedings outside of the Federation, RBC noted.

“We Still, Google said in this years second quarterly report that it does not “believe these legal matters will have a material adverse effect on Google’s business.”

RBC listed the “third-party victims in the case” as TV channels Zvezda, Channel One, VGTRK (TV channels Russia 1, Russia 24, etc.), Parliamentary Television, Moscow Media, TV Center, NTV, GPM Entertainment Television, Public Television of Russia, TV Channel 360, TRK Petersburg, Orthodox Television Foundation, National Sports TV Channel, Technological Company Center, as well as IP Simonyan M.S., representing the YouTube channel of TV presenter Margarita Simonyan.

So, how much money is it really?

Undecillion, which in mathematical terms is 1e+36 or 1 (x 10 to the 36th) – and also one large number after decillion, according to PrepScholar.

To put in context 2 Russian rubles equals about .21 cents in US currency. Google's annual revenue for 2023 was listed as $305.63 billion.

According to Google Finance, 2 trillion rubles equals $20.6 billion. Add in another three zeroes to make it a quadrillion, and Google would owe Russia roughly $10.3 quadrillion.

Going down PrepScholar’s list of significant large number names, the pattern shows that one would simply “add three extra zeros to the end of a number to get the next number,” and so on.

After quadrillion, you have quintillion, sextillion, septillion, octillion, and decillion….with each new number being 1,000 times larger than the previous one, the blog said. Well, you get the picture.

Ironically, this pattern happens until you get near the bottom of PrepScholar’s large numbers list until you reach ‘Ten-duotrigintillion’ – also more commonly known as a ‘Googol.’

“Yes, this is where search engine Google got their name from,” Prep Scholar reveals, adding “there are no numbers between Googol, Skewer's Number, Centillion, or Googolplex,” the final four on the list.

Maybe Google should be just happy it wasn’t a ‘duodecillion,’ the next large number in line after undecillion. We’ll check back next year.

As for our the use of the word “zillion” in the article’s title, “‘Zillion’ is not actually a real number; it's simply a term used to refer to an undetermined but extremely large quantity,” PrepScholar noted.