Russian court fines Google $81,690 for failing to delete illegal content

A court in Russia has handed search engine giant, Google three separate fines totaling $81,690 (6 Million Roubles) over a failure to delete banned content in Moscow on Tuesday.

This is happening at a time when Moscow and Google are at a loggerhead. Russia’s communications watchdog on Monday warned that Moscow could eventually slow down the company’s traffic in the country if it failed to delete prohibited content.

Russia has already placed a punitive slowdown on U.S. social network Twitter for not deleting banned content, part of a push by Moscow to rein in Western tech giants and beef up what it calls its internet “sovereignty”.

Moscow’s Tagansky District court said in a statement that Google was found guilty of administrative offenses and was ordered to pay 2 million roubles for each offense.

The levies bother on posts that Russia says encouraged minors to join an unsanctioned protest in January when people across Russia took to the streets to support Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny after he was detained

The Interfax news agency said, later on, Tuesday the court will also consider eight reports concerning Facebook, which could lead to a total fine of up to $435,520.00 (32 million roubles),

In April, a court issued three separate fines against Twitter totaling 8.9 million roubles, over accusations it had failed to delete banned content.

Tiktok has also been fined for similar offences this year.

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