Russian Court Fines Settled for Tech Giants, Excluding Google and Meta: Report

It seems that the fines imposed by Russian courts on Alphabet, the parent company of Google and YouTube, as well as Meta, TikTok, and Telegram, have been settled. According to a report by Reuters, these companies are no longer registered as debtors in the Russian government’s debt collector database.

However, the database accessed by Reuters still includes X (formerly Twitter) and Twitch with fines of 51 million rubles ($560,730) and 23 million rubles ($252,879) respectively.

Google, Meta, TikTok, and Telegram did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comments.

Russia has been in conflict with foreign technology companies over what it considers illegal content and failure to store user data locally. Tensions escalated after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Following the invasion, Russia blocked Facebook and Instagram, subsidiaries of Meta, and the Twitter platform at that time (now known as X). The YouTube platform, owned by Google, also became a target of the Russian government.

In late 2023, a Russian court imposed a fine of 4.6 billion rubles ($50.4 million) on Google as a percentage of its annual sales in Russia. Meta, classified as “extremist” in 2022, faced fines deducted from its Russian revenues.