Russia has been clamping down on large American technology companies and hitting them with multiple fines. Recently, Russia has issued multiple fines on American companies like Google and Twitter. A Moscow court announced that it had imposed a fine of 7.2 billion rubles ($98 million) on Google. The reason for the fine is that the company did not delete illegal content(s). The latest report shows that Meta (formerly Facebook) was also heavily fined by Russia today. Following Google, a Moscow court announced that it imposed a fine of 2 billion rubles ($27 million) on Meta for failing to delete illegal content.
Just last Thursday, Russia just imposed a fine of 13 million rubles ($177,000) on Meta. Prior to this, Meta had encountered multiple fines in Russia, amounting to at least 66 million rubles ($900,000).
In terms of the amount of fines, Meta, like Google, was fined based on revenue this time. Russia threatened Google and Facebook in October this year. The country claims that it would seek to impose fines ranging from 5% to 20% of its annual revenue in Russia. The values here will be up to hundreds of millions of dollars.
Russia’s national communications regulatory agency, the Federal Agency for Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media Supervision (Roskomnadzor) also stated that if Google and Meta do not delete illegal content, they may face more fines in the future.
Gizchina News of the week
Russia to slap a $240 million fine on Google
Google is facing a couple of issues in different parts of the world. Today, the Russian communications regulatory agency, the Federal Agency for Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media Supervision (Roskomnadzor), announced today that it will issue a huge fine to Google before the end of the month. Roskomnadzor said that it will seek to impose a fine of 5% to 20% of its annual Russian revenue. The fine will get up to a maximum of $240 million U.S. dollars. The reason for this fine is that Google has repeatedly failed to delete content deemed illegal. This is by far the strongest punishment Russia has imposed on any foreign technology company.
Roskomnadzor had earlier fined Google for not deleting illegal content, but the fine was relatively small. Roskomnadzor said today that Google has not paid a fine of 32.5 million rubles (approximately $458,100) so far this year. In recent months, Russia has taken a series of measures to strengthen the supervision of American technology companies and restrict access to online information. For this reason, there have been punishments for companies like Apple, Google, Twitter, and Facebook.
According to Roskomnadzor, it will significantly increase the fines on American technology companies such as Google and Facebook. Roskomnadzor data shows that so far this year, Facebook has fines of up to 66 million rubles (approximately $900,000) to deal with. Similarly, Russia has hit Twitter and Google with 38.4 million rubles (approximately $542,000) and 26 million rubles (approximately $367,000) fines, respectively. In addition, other companies like Google and Apple have varying degrees of fines.
