The requested sum is the equivalent of 20 quintillion dollars, a quintillion corresponds to a 1 with 33 zeros. According to the Moscow Times, this unimaginable sum is due to a won lawsuit by the Russian media companies Tsargrad and RIA FAN. Russian courts fined Google 100,000 rubles a day. This penalty should double for each passing week until YouTube restores the accounts. Since 2020, this has resulted in a sum that far exceeds the amount of money available worldwide. According to “RBC”, a total of 17 Russian TV channels have now filed a lawsuit against Google. YouTube has removed the channels of numerous state-affiliated Russian media companies because they support the war of aggression against Ukraine.
The Russian authorities then imposed penalties but refrained from blocking YouTube in Russia. It also seems clear to the Kremlin that Google could never pay this fine even if it wanted to. The independent news platform quotes Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov, who speaks of a symbolic fine in this context. The horrendous sum is intended to draw the US company's attention to the situation and encourage it to remedy it, said Peskov.
As the Bloomberg news agency reported, international lawsuits from Russian companies are a persistent problem for Google. Three media companies whose channels YouTube had blocked have now gone to South African courts to sue for the fines that a Moscow judge had awarded them. YouTube blocked the accounts on the grounds that they were run by sanctioned supporters of Putin. According to Bloomberg, the legal battle over billions of dollars in payments has been ongoing for almost two years and has already taken place in nine countries.