Russia slaps Google with $6.8 million fine

RUSSIA (Web Desk) - Search engine Google has been slapped with a whopping 438 million rouble ($6.8 million) fine for pre-installing applications on mobile devices running its Android operating system by a Russian anti-monopoly watchdog FAS (Federal Antimonopoly Service).

Russia began investigating Google for antitrust violations last year after the largest search engine in the country, Yandex, complained to authorities that Google's promotion of its own services over alternatives (like Yandex) on Android was anti-competitive.

The "Federal Antimonopoly Service" has now decided to impose a hefty ban on the search engine giant. The decision is deemed favorable to country's own tech giant Yandex.

On the other hand,Google reflected on the decision that it was evaluating the ruling handed down by the FAS, and would decide on its next step.

“We have received a notification from FAS about the imposed fine,” Google's press service said on Thursday in a written statement.

“We will familiarize ourselves with the ruling before deciding on further actions.” he added.

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The fine is obviously a minute amount of money for Google, which has $75 billion in annual revenue. Google is facing anti-trust in the European Union as well over Search dominance as well as its Android mobile OS.  In June this year, Google was slapped with fresh EU anti-competition charges around its advertising business