Russian court fines Google $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

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.

To put that into perspective, the World Bank estimates global GDP as around $100 trillion, which is peanuts compared to the prospective fine. Google would therefore have to find more money than exists on Earth to pay Moscow - but on Tuesday fell a little short of that mark when it posted $88 billion quarterly revenue.

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.

The court imposed a fine of 100 thousand rubles ($1,025) per day, with the total fine doubling every week. Owing to compound interest, Google is now on the hook for an insane amount of money, or what the judge on Monday called “a case in which there are many, many zeros.”