On Monday Russia fined Google 21.1 billion rubles (some $263 million at the pre-war exchange rate, $360 million at the current rate) for repeatedly failing to remove prohibited content on its YouTube video platform.
Censorship on the Russian Internet has been on the rise over the past few years, reaching totalitarian heights since the beginning of Russias’ invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24. President Vladimir V. Putin signed a law effectively criminalizing any public opposition to the war as an attempt to silence critics while spotlighting pro-Kremlin media. Under this law, even the use of the word “war” is off limits.
In March, the authorities restricted access to Google News, accusing it of providing access to “false” information about the war in Ukraine. Instagram and Whatsapp were banned in Russia after Meta allowed hate speech against Russian invaders.
Since Feb. 26 — two days after Russia started invading Ukraine — Twitter’s services have been restricted in Russia, but not fully blocked.
Data storage violation
In a separate decision last week, a Moscow court fined Apple for failing to store Russian citizens’ personal data on Russia-based servers, as stipulated by the demanding local legislation, Interfax reported.
The court fined the company 2 million rubles ($25,000 at the pre-war exchange rate). This is the first such penalty for Apple in Russia, which had officially notified the authorities, in 2018, that it had moved the concerned data to servers within the country
Russian courts repeatedly fined international companies for not complying with this legislation. For example in August last year Facebook and Twitter were fined 15 million rubles (some $200,000 at the exchange rate of that time) and 17 million rubles ($230,000), respectively, for repeat infractions, while WhatsApp was required to pay 4 million rubles ($54,000) for a first-time offense. Just weeks before Google was imposed a first-time fine of 3 million rubles for failing to move Russian users’ data to domestic servers.
According to the law, companies operating in Russia are required to store Russian users’ or clients’ personal data on servers physically located in the country. Numerous foreign and domestic players were concerned, including global players who tended to store their users’ data in borderless clouds (see white paper by EWDN and EY). A range of international businesses — including, in particular, Alibaba, AliExpress, Apple, Booking.com, LG Electronics, Microsoft, PayPal and Samsung — have managed to transfer user data from foreign data centers to Russia.
But several key international companies have been less law-abiding, playing cat-and-mouse with the Russian authorities for years already. In 2016, the authorities went as far as blocking access to blocking access to LinkedIn, for non compliance.
