For many, the decision by a Russian court to fine Google $20 decillion (a number “so large that it becomes somewhat abstract”) was simply laughable, a sign that the Russian legal system no longer operated in the realm of the real. Indeed, it was termed “symbolic” by Putin’s spokesperson. 

But it was never meant to be a joke. It’s just the last move in the Russian offensive against internet freedoms that has, in fact, scored a series of dramatic successes this year. 

The proclaimed objective of the fine is to force Google to lift a ban on pro-Kremlin state media accounts on YouTube, like RT or Sputnik, but the real target is to harm Google around the world by snaring it in a global spider’s web of legal action. 

The attack is well-defined and multi-staged. 

First, the Kremlin focused its court case against Google on YouTube channels, which were not outright Russian state propaganda but focused on something less overtly political, like the church.

The Tsargrad channel, closely associated with the Russian Orthodox Church and blocked since 2020, hired the Moscow-based law firm Art de Lex to launch a lawsuit against Google. The firm’s managing partner, Dmitry Magonya, has made no secret of where he stood in terms of internet freedoms: in October 2021, Dmitry Magonya took part in a panel on “Censorship in media and the sovereign internet,” organized by the Orthodox festival — and blessed by Patriarch Kirill. Magonya said that if censorship is not provided by one’s national government, then it will be imposed by a foreign administration. 

In 2021, a Moscow court fined Google for banning Tsargrad: and for the first time, the court imposed an astreinte, that is a monetary penalty for failure to reinstate the channel. In April last year, the court ruled against Google for banning another Orthodox channel — Spas — and imposed another astreinte. The fine would double for each week of noncompliance, with no upper limit.

Next, the Kremlin took its attack beyond the country’s borders.

This year, a lawsuit against Google for banning Russian YouTube was brought to court in South Africa. The suit did not mention Tsargrad, possibly because the channel’s owner, Konstantin Malofeev, has been enmeshed in a variety of sanctions since 2014, starting with his role in the annexation of Crimea. In February 2023, a US court ordered him to forfeit $5.4m of assets. 

So, the case focused on another Orthodox TV channel, Spas. Once again, Art de Lex was employed to find a partner in South Africa and chose Johannesburg-based Pagel Schulenburg Attorneys to take the suit to the Gauteng division of the High Court.

This summer, the South African court ruled in favor of Spas and ordered all Google’s assets in this country to be seized. 

That had been the Kremlin’s goal from day one. Back in 2021, Magonya explained that the Russian court decision provided “a precedent both for Russia and on a global scale.” 

Indeed, it has. South Africa is a member of the BRICS group of nations, which Russia hopes will become the nucleus of a global anti-Western alliance. 

Of course, not every BRICS member’s legal system will display the same enthusiasm to enforce Russian lawsuits against global tech giants, but it’s clear that this is now at least possible, and it gives the Kremlin and other authoritarian leaders around the world significant leverage.  (Russian media reports that similar attempts to enforce the Russian court ruling were underway against Google in Turkey, Hungary, and Spain and that the tech company has filed counter-suits in the US and UK.)

Russia’s legal success abroad has been accompanied by progress in censorship technology at home. Andrei Lipov, the chief Russian internet censor, has reported progress in the Kremlin’s attempts to shut down the highly popular YouTube for Russian users. This followed action by his agency to significantly slow YouTube streaming.  

Russians, many of whom use YouTube for entertainment rather than political news and debate, soon began moving to Russian-made substitutes. As a result, the Russian YouTube audience, while still the largest in the country, became comparable to the audience of Russian services — its 47 million daily users compared with 36.8 million on VK Video and 5.5 million on Rutube. 

Lipov’s agency also succeeded in blocking 197 VPN services, which allow users to circumvent state censorship.

Other Google services also came under attack. For instance, Russian users have been told to shut their Gmail accounts and move to Russian mail services for their communications with government online services.

In this fight between a tech giant and government censors, the enemies of free access are winning. The founding idea of the internet as an open, global space is in decline, and users are finding national borders beginning to confine them once again.

Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov are Non-resident Senior Fellows with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA.) They are Russian investigative journalists and co-founders of Agentura.ru, a watchdog of Russian secret service activities.

Bandwidth is CEPA’s online journal dedicated to advancing transatlantic cooperation on tech policy. All opinions expressed on Bandwidth are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.