Disagreeing with this unilateral decision, on July 1, 2024,

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adio 44 produces several YouTube channels and has been a member of the YouTube partner program since 2012, which allowed the St. Petersburg-based company to receive a portion of the revenue from advertising on its content. In the spring of 2022, Google disabled monetization options within Russia, but Radio 44 continued to receive money from advertising, as its channels are also watched by an audience outside of Russia. However, in July 2023, Google blocked Radio 44's payment account in the Google AdSense contextual advertising service without notice.

Radio 44 LLC filed a germany telegram lawsuit against Google LLC, Google Ireland Ltd, and the Russian Google LLC in the Moscow Arbitration Court. A month later, on August 2, the court accepted the statement of claim and initiated proceedings on the case.

Yesterday, November 27, a preliminary hearing on this claim was held in the Moscow Arbitration Court. Maxim Yuzhakov, an adviser to the litigation and arbitration practice of Nextons, who represented Google Ireland Ltd by proxy, stated in court that Radio 44 LLC did not provide the terms of use of YouTube and the terms of use of AdSense, on which it bases its claims. He also noted that these terms of use differ for different countries and have many versions, and the defendants' representatives were unable to establish whether the plaintiff has a business relationship with YouTube and AdSense.

Maxim Yuzhakov added that such conditions contain a prorogation clause (an agreement between the parties on the jurisdiction of a civil dispute to a specific court) and in the case of the defendants, they are talking about the courts of foreign states, not the Russian Federation. On this basis, he asked the court to leave the claim of Radio 44 LLC without consideration, and also to request from the plaintiff the terms of use of YouTube and the terms of use of AdSense, to which he refers.

Tatyana Marshanova, CEO of Radio 44 LLC, responded that the terms of use of Google, YouTube and AdSense are publicly available documents that can be downloaded from their websites even without registration. At the same time, she pointed out the difficulty in delineating responsibility between Google and YouTube. Indeed, the terms of use of YouTube state: "The service provider is Google LLC," and the menu on the main page of the YouTube portal contains the copyright © 2024 Google LLC.

In response to the defense's claim that AdSense's terms of use for Russia were not available on the service's website, Tatyana Marshanova confirmed that they were there at the time the lawsuit was filed (she presented a copy of the document to the court). As ComNews found out, AdSense removed the terms of use for Russia from the website on August 12, 2024, after it announced the suspension of the ability to monetize content using AdSense, AdMob, and Ad Manager for publishers living in Russia (the American service stated the reason as: "In connection with the events taking place in Russia").

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