FAS fined Google and Mail.ru for advertising

Today, the Moscow Department of the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) in Moscow found Google and Mail.ru guilty of violating the law "On Advertising". As a result, companies were fined - Mail.ru LLC is obliged to pay 100 thousand rubles, while Google LLC is 150 thousand, as reported by the FAS representatives in an official statement.

The reason for the imposition of a fine was advertising LLC "Ruscredit" on the proposal of the contribution of consumer funds. The ad was distributed through the Google AdWords and myTarget ad networks, for which Google and Mail.ru are responsible. According to representatives of the antimonopoly service, it is companies that should be responsible for moderating the advertised ads.
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In the case of Ruskredit, deposit services were actually advertised from a company that did not have a banking license.

“Google LLC and Mail.ru LLC, having a real opportunity to control the content of distributed ads, did not take sufficient measures to prevent violation of advertising legislation,” said Irina Gudkova, deputy head of the Moscow FAS.

According to clause 7 of Article 7 “On Advertising”, in the absence of permits and licenses from the advertiser for the provision of services or sales of goods, advertising of such things is prohibited. In turn, the verification of the availability of such permits should be conducted at the level of advertising services on the Internet or other sources.

Recently, the FAS has already fined Google and other companies for violating the law "On Advertising" - then the company advertised the services of artificial interruption of pregnancy, as well as gambling. Despite the relatively small amounts of fines, such court decisions create a prejudice, on the basis of which decisions on new cases on similar topics can be made later.

Recently, more and more attention has been paid at the state level to the issues of controlling domestic and foreign IT companies, as well as their taxation. So, now the possibility of adopting amendments to the law with a “tax on Google” is being actively discussed - if the government accepts it, then distributors of digital content will have to pay VAT, which will lead to an increase in prices for any services on the network.