Google is the world’s biggest search engine and its associated services, from cloud hosting to domain name registrations generate billions of dollars in revenue, alongside advertising.
The war in Ukraine is raging, after Russia’s invasion of it in late February. There are millions of displaced refugees and numerous casualties among civilians. Ukraine is holding on but needs humanitarian support unlike any other European country in recent memory.
Help Ukraine – Photo by Elena Mozhvilo on Unsplash
Google is committing to matching up to $5 million dollars in user donations by the end of April, as explained on this page:
The war in Ukraine has created a humanitarian disaster. The UN has warned that the number of people fleeing the country may rise to 5 million in the coming weeks and months. Our teams are working around the clock to support people in Ukraine through our products, defend against cybersecurity threats, and surface reliable information, while taking extraordinary measures to stop the spread of misinformation and disrupt disinformation campaigns online. To help provide immediate aid and support relief efforts, Google.org and Google employees have already committed over $25 million in donations and in-kind support. To further aid relief efforts, Google.org will match up to $5 million in donations to this campaign until April 30th. Join us in donating to the organizations below.
Google’s outreach is massive and by simply displaying a message when one checks Gmail they are surely generating donations for Ukraine faster than many other tech companies.
Daily updates by Google about their war relief effort can be found here.
Where the list of the names of oligarchs,the properties,their addresses…
Glory to Ukraine
Glory to Ukraine
Glory to Ukraine
For clarity, that’s 10 minutes revenue based on 2021 figures or 30 minutes profit based on Q4 earnings ($257.6 Billion & $20.64 Billion respectively), which seems such a slither of their income that it’d be more of a chore to write the blurb that goes with it. There’ll be reasons for that other than the money.
And it feels quite offset by the potential added income from even just a year of that recent Mozilla move to revert users to the Firefox default, which Google pay their micro-“competitor” $550 million a year for the privilege of being.
Russia alone has around 1/50th of the worlds population although as the 11th largest economy is pretty valuable in monetary terms despite its ingrained disparities, especially over many user lifetimes of not clearing cookies.