One of the unchallengeable rules of business is that it is impossible to abstain from doing it in foreign markets where local conditions require your company to compromise on its ethical standards. This is seen clearly in tech because of the low costs of establishing service in foreign markets: it comes for free with the Internet. A typical sequence might be a platform or service declaring that it is, say, "the free speech harbor for all humans," then censoring posts for the Arstotzkan government, then acting like you're being silly and naive to suggest that it even has a choice. Not doing business in Arstotzka is inconceivable! They would block the site! We have an ad team there! Elon Musk's hobby now is speedrunning this dilemma every other week in a new country. Anyway, for all its groveling and scraping over the years, Google has earned a $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 fine in Russia after co-operation with it finally became politically impossible due to the Ukraine War. Beat that, EU!
A Russian court has ruled that Google owes Russian media stations around $20 decillion in fines for blocking their content, and the fines could get bigger. … The bizarre amount has been calculated after a four-year court case that started after YouTube banned the ultra-nationalist Russian channel Tsargrad in 2020 in response to the US sanctions imposed against its owner. Following Putin's illegal invasion of Ukraine in 2022 more channels were added to the banned list and 17 stations are now suing the Chocolate Factory, including Zvezda (a TV channel owned by Putin's Ministry of Defence), according to local media.
"Google was called by a Russian court to administrative liability under Art. 13.41 of the Administrative Offenses Code for removing channels on the YouTube platform. The court ordered the company to restore these channels," lawyer Ivan Morozov told state media outlet TASS.
The court imposed a fine of 100 thousand rubles ($1,025) per day, with the total fine doubling every week.
Google, to its credit, hasn't tried to persevere in Russia as some Western companies have: it laid off or relocated all its employees there at the start of the war and wrote off the local operation.
