Translated material
A court in England banned three Russian TV channels from conducting proceedings with Google in all other countries except the US and UK
The High Court of England and Wales sided with Google and prohibited Russian television channels from demanding the seizure of the corporation's assets in order to recover the fines imposed on it by a Russian court, which were already many times higher than the total GDP of all countries, Bloomberg reports .
RBC alsowrites about the court decision with reference to a document that the editorial office has at its disposal. The wording of RBC states that the court prohibited three Russian television channels - Russia Today, Spas and Tsargrad - from suing Google over the issue of blocking the YouTube channels of these media. RBC explains that the prohibition applies to the commencement of new or continuation of ongoing proceedings on this issue in any jurisdiction other than the US or UK.
A Google spokesperson told Bloomberg that Russian courts have for years “imposed unprecedented fines and arbitrary legal sanctions” on the company in an attempt to restrict access to information about Google services and “as punishment for compliance with international sanctions against Russian individuals and organizations."
According to the latest estimate, cited by Bloomberg, the amount of fines imposed on Google reached 125 nonillion dollars - as the publication explains, this is one followed by 30 zeros. Global GDP at the end of 2023 was just over $106 trillion.
At the same time, at the end of October 2024, RBC cited a different figure. According to the publication's source, the total amount of demands from Russian TV channels against Google amounted to two undecillion rubles - that's one followed by 36 zeros.
- Russian pro-government media began suing Google in 2020, when the accounts of the Tsargrad TV channel and the RIA FAN publication were blocked on YouTube. After the start of the war in 2022, the pages of Sputnik, NTV, Rossiya 24, RT and many other Russian television channels were also blocked.
- In 2022, a Russian court imposed a fine on Google due to its refusal to comply with the requirement to restore access to Russian TV channels. The amount of this fine, according to the court decision, should have increased in case of refusal to comply - by 100 thousand rubles for each day of inactivity, with this amount doubling every week. As a result, by the end of October 2024, we were talking about an undecillion rubles. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the amount of demands of Russian TV channels against Google “full of symbolism.”
- Russian media also demand execution of court decisions through the courts of other countries, including Turkey, Hungary, Spain and South Africa. South Africa's High Court in June seized Google's assets in the country. Google itself filed lawsuits in the courts of Great Britain and the United States to achieve a ban on Russian TV channels conducting legal proceedings against the company outside Russia.