• A Russian court has fined Google for failing to restore YouTube accounts linked to Russian TV channels.
• The fine amounts to approximately 20.6 decillion dollars – an amount many orders of magnitude higher than the world’s gross domestic product.
• Google’s Russian entity filed for bankruptcy in 2022 amid a broader exodus from Russia, leaving few avenues to enforce payment.

A legal dispute between Google and Russia over suspended YouTube accounts has resulted in a fine so high it exceeds all the money on earth.

Ivan Morozov, a Moscow-based lawyer, told state news channel TASS that a Russian court has ordered the tech giant to restore Russian media accounts on YouTube, a company owned by Google.

He said Google’s failure to do so has resulted in a fine that has been regularly doubled for years.

There is no limit on the total, the lawyer said.

Morozov, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, said the cumulative amount has now reached 2 billion rubles – an almost unfathomable figure.

At the current exchange rate, the fine is approximately 20.6 decillion dollars.

A decillion is a number followed by 33 zeros – which in this case brings the fine to $20,604,600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

To put this in perspective, the world’s gross domestic product is equivalent to about $105 trillion, a tiny fraction of the fine.

It is unlikely that Google would be able or willing to pay such an amount, which according to RBK, a Russian business media company, is related to legal claims filed by more than a dozen Russian TV channels over the suspension of YouTube accounts.

Google suspended the accounts to comply with U.S. sanctions, according to court documents reviewed by Bloomberg in 2021.

Nigel Gould-Davies, senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, told BI in a message that the size of the fine is “clearly insane” and “absurd.”

“So even if Google had given Russia everything the world produced this year, the country would have paid only about 3% of this fine every day since the universe began,” Gould-Davies wrote on X.

He likened it to “trying a dead person” – appropriate since Google does not have an active presence in Russia and has few assets to lay claim to.

In 2022, Google’s Russian legal arm, Google LLC, filed for bankruptcy and authorities seized its bank accounts, although free services continue to operate in the country.

Google’s parent company, Alphabet, doesn’t seem to think this will have a material impact.

It has regularly referred to these cases in its quarterly results. Business Insider found the first mention in the first quarter of 2022.

In the earnings report for the third quarter of 2024 published on Tuesday, Alphabet writes about “ongoing legal matters” regarding Russia.

It referred to civil judgments that have included “compound fines” “in connection with account termination disputes,” including those of people on sanctions lists.

“We do not believe these ongoing legal matters will have a material adverse effect,” the report said – an assessment in line with previous reports.

Google did not respond to a request for comment from BI.