The court approved the recovery of 21.7 billion rubles of a turnover fine from Google for repeated failure to remove information about the course of the war in Ukraine from YouTube, Interfax reports .
In July, the Federal Antimonopoly Service decided to fine Google 2 billion rubles for blocking accounts. According to the FAS, Google's rules related to blocking are "opaque, biased and unpredictable."
“This leads to sudden blocking and deletion of user accounts without warning and justification for action. The FAS Russia has established that such behavior infringes on the interests of users, and also limits competition in related markets,” the FAS said in a statement.
The fact that YouTube could be blocked in Russia by the fall, when the Russian RuTube service is launched, was previously said by Igor Ashmanov, a member of the Presidential Council for the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights.
After the outbreak of war in Ukraine, Roskomnadzor blocked the social networks Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. The RKN also demanded that the events in Ukraine be called a “special operation” and blocked the websites of most independent publications, including The Insider.
Before the start of the war (in December), a court in Moscow had already found Google guilty of repeatedly refusing to remove prohibited information and for the first time imposed a turnover fine of more than 7.2 billion rubles. In May, the bailiffs decided to forcibly collect this fine from Google.