A Moscow court has fined two of the biggest technology companies over their failure to delete content banned by local law.
The Tagansky District Court ruled that Google repeatedly neglected to remove the banned content, and ordered the company to pay an administrative fine of about 7.2 billion rubles (appx $98.4 million). It also fined Meta, Facebook’s parent company, $27 million.
The content was not specified, but Russia regularly takes legal action for not removing content it labels illegal, such as pornographic material or posts condoning drugs and suicide.
Russian state communications watchdog Roskomnadzor said Google and Meta were specifically accused of violating the ban on distributing content that promotes extremist ideology, insults religious beliefs and encourages dangerous behaviour by minors, among other things.
The agency said that Facebook and Instagram have failed to remove 2,000 items despite the courts’ requests to do so, while Google has failed to delete 2,600 such items.
Google’s fine was calculated under a legal clause that allows courts to impose between 5% and 10% of a company’s turnover, according to the state-run RIA Novosti news agency. According to the RBC news website, Google Russia earned 85 billion rubles ($1.1 billion) in 2020, and it was maximum penalty that could have been imposed for repeated violation.
Google said it would study the court documents before deciding on its next steps. Russian courts had previously imposed smaller fines on Google, Facebook and Twitter this year, but Friday’s rulings marked the first time the size of the fine was calculated based on revenue.
“We’ll study the court documents and then decide on next steps,” Google’s press service told AFP.
Russia has already blocked a number of websites that have refused to cooperate with authorities, such as the video platform Dailymotion and LinkedIn. As part of broad efforts to bend foreign tech under its control, Russia in September banned six major VPN providers including Nord VPN and Express VPN.
Russia also introduced a new law demanding that smartphones, computers and other gadgets sold in the country come with pre-installed domestic software and apps.
Earlier this year, Google was slapped with a 500 million euros (USD593 million) fine by French antitrust authority for failing to negotiate with news organisations over the use of their content.
