MOSCOW

A Moscow court on Wednesday found Telegram and US corporation Google guilty of violating Russian legislation and imposed fines.

The Tagansky city court fined Telegram 7 million rubles ($91,300) for refusing to remove a number of advertisements related to the remote sale of alcohol and LGBT content.

In another hearing, Google was fined over 22 million rubles ($287,000) for distributing VPN services, and allowing to access websites blocked in Russia through Google Play.

The new fine adds to Google's previous fines. On Feb.19, the Supreme Court upheld a ruling ordering Google to pay an extraordinary 91.5 quintillion rubles (about $1.2 quintillion). The experts counted that this figure was roughly 1 million times larger than the global gross domestic product.

The legal dispute began in 2020 when Russian media outlets sued Google over blocked YouTube accounts. Russian courts ruled in their favor, but Google did not comply, triggering a progressive daily penalty that started at 100,000 rubles and doubled each week.

Following the onset of the conflict in Ukraine, Google suspended most operations in the country, and its Russian subsidiary filed for bankruptcy in October 2023.

The court ultimately capped the fine at 91.5 quintillion rubles ($1.2 quintillion) as of the bankruptcy date. Before that cap, the theoretical penalty had ballooned to 1.81 duodecillion rubles, a number with 39 zeros.