$20,565,635,200,000,003-exa

Posted by By Dan Taylor 1 Min Read

This astronomical “fine” against Google, set at an inconceivably high 2 undecillion rubles, has certainly sparked a mixture of humor and disbelief online.

The number is so exaggerated that it dwarfs the combined value of all global assets, making it a theoretical sum with no practical expectation of payment.

This sum is a product of exponential fines doubling each week, which quickly spiraled beyond realistic amounts.

Social media reactions have been filled with satire, highlighting the absurdity, with users joking about Google’s lack of a “spare planet” to cover the fine and musing about Russia’s ambitious court tactics.

This ongoing legal tension began in 2020 when Google was fined for blocking certain Russian channels on YouTube, including the controversial Tsargrad TV.

The fine’s escalation is Russia’s way of reinforcing restrictions against international tech giants, especially as they increasingly limit Russian media reach abroad.

Despite the surreal figure, this highlights the continued use of regulatory fines as a tool in geopolitical tech conflicts—though here, it’s clearly more symbolic than actionable.

Dan Taylor
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Dan Taylor is the founder and editor of International Search Insights (ISI), the publication behind ReadIsi, and a Partner and Head of Innovation (Search & AI) at SALT.agency. He has worked in search for more than a decade, in-house and agency-side, and is regarded as one of the West’s leading voices on search engines beyond Google, including Yandex, Baidu, Naver and Cốc Cốc. On ReadIsi, Dan covers the engines and AI answer platforms that English-language coverage tends to miss: Baidu and ERNIE, Yandex and Alice AI, Naver, Cốc Cốc, Shenma, Sogou, WeChat and Weibo search, plus DeepSeek and Alibaba’s Qwen. He also keeps dated records of documented changes, such as the Yandex, Baidu and Naver algorithm update histories and the DeepSeek, ERNIE and Qwen model update histories. His approach is to take learnings from global search engines and apply logic with a high evidence threshold. A claim needs a source, patterns seen in one market are treated as a hypothesis until they are checked in another, and where the evidence is thin he says so. For brands, that means advice built on what can be shown, with measurement that separates being cited from being chosen. Dan is credited with coining the term “edge SEO” and won the inaugural TechSEO Boost research competition in 2018 for his work on CDN and edge changes for SEO. In 2026 he was credited with coining “Infinite Tail” to describe how keyword research is changing with AI search. He is the author of AI Search Marketing For The Travel Sector, writes for Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land and Travel Marketing Guy, and has advised technology, SaaS, travel and enterprise ecommerce brands, including Cloudflare, GitLab and Airbnb. He has given multiple talks and panels at the International Search Summit in Barcelona, and has also spoken at Optimization Moscow, brightonSEO, Google Search Central Live Deep Dive Asia in Bangkok, Athens SEO and the Asia SEO Virtual Summit 2026, where his talk looked at how Baidu, Naver, DeepSeek, Tencent, Cốc Cốc and Yandex built their own AI answers.
Founder & Editor