Google Pay ₽1.5m Fine For “Insufficient” Filtering Of Prohibited Content

Google have notified a Moscow court that they have paid a fine levied to them for repeated lapses in sufficiently filtering out content that has been prohibited to users within the Russian Federation.

The court press secretary, Zulfiya Gurinchuk, told Interfax:

The court received a receipt for payment of a fine of 1.5 million rubles imposed by Google LLC.

This fine came into force on July 7th, and had the deadline of September 4th for voluntary payment – so Google have left it last minute. The fine of ₽1.5m roughly equates to around $20,000 (US).

This is the third fine that Google pays for violating Russian law. For the first time, the company was fined in November 2018 for ₽500k for refusing to connect to the register of sites prohibited in the Russian Federation to filter search results.

This fine was then repeated and reissued in July 2019 in the amount of  ₽700k. Then, according to Roskomnadzor, about a third of links from the register of prohibited information remained present.

Dan Taylor
Dan Taylor is an experienced SEO consultant and has worked with brands and companies on optimizing for Russia (and Yandex) for a number of years. Winner of the inaugural 2018 TechSEO Boost competition, webmaster at HreflangChecker.com and Sloth.Cloud, and founder of RussianSearchNews.com.