The image is by Alex Castro.
A Russian court has fined the internet giant $98 million for not removing illegal content. The 7.2 billion rouble fine is eight percent of the company's revenue in Russia, and comes amid a push to exert more control over big tech companies and the content people publish on their platforms.
When the court documents are available, the company will decide on the next steps. The Russian official was cited by Bloomberg as threatening "very unpleasant measures" if the government doesn't get its way with the deletion of banned content, which includes promotion of drugs and posts by organizations the government says are extremists or terroristic.
Russian regulators are trying to control foreign tech companies.
This isn't the first time that Google has been fined in Russia. It faces another that could double in size each week unless it reverses its ban on a conservative Russian news channel, though it says the ban is due to US and UK sanctions against the channel's owner. Russian regulators have slowed down the services of companies like Meta because of their failures.
Russian regulators have tried to get tech companies to comply in other ways. The country passed a law in the middle of the year that required all devices to come with Russian software. If they run websites with 500,000 daily visitors from Russia, they will have to open offices in the country. Russian officials threatened to prosecute the employees of Apple and Google if they removed political opponents' voting apps from their app stores.
