Seriously, if we’d put it in the title separated by commas, the site wouldn’t have been able to display it… and Vladimir Putin missed a trick!
The Moscow Times reports that the Russian government has fined the Alphabet subsidiary 2 billion rubles. This number alone is incomprehensible. Let’s write down a two followed by thirty-six zeros. That is 2.5 decillion dollars. This amount is unaffordable because the World Bank estimates that the total GDP of the planet in 2023 will be $105 trillion (105, then twelve zeros). MarketWatch’s overly optimistic estimate of the planet’s total wealth in 2017 was a few quadrillion dollars. If you take out everything that isn’t money, you’re left with $90.4 trillion.
Now, compared to that, $2,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (yes, in dollars, that’s EXACTLY the amount) is really a sum that is simply impossible to produce. You can say without kidding that there’s no money in the world for it. There really is not, it is simply impossible to impose such a fine, let alone pay it! Yes, especially when you consider that Google’s total revenue last year was $307 billion. So how in the world did the Russians come up with this amount?
According to RBC, YouTube blocked some Russian channels. In 2020, the pro-Kremlin Tsargrad and RIA FAN won a lawsuit against Google after the tech company blocked YouTube accounts. The fine was 100,000 rubles a day, doubling every week. Interestingly, RIA FAN is part of the Patriot Media Group, which was previously founded by Yevgeny Prigozhin, who attempted a coup against Putin last year.
Google suspended advertising in 2022, shortly after Russia’s war with Ukraine, and Google’s Russian subsidiary officially filed for bankruptcy last year. If the company were to return to the country, it would first have to sweep the unfathomable fine under the rug.
It is another thing that there is no carpet of that size in the world. If the Russians were smart, they’d have fined Google one googol rubel. (That’s a number 1 followed by 100 zeros).
Source: PCGamer, The Moscow Times, MarketWatch, RBC, Reuters
