OREANDA-NEWS. Booking.com hotel booking service was fined one billion three hundred million rubles. The Federal Antimonopoly Service punished him for abusing his dominant position in the Russian market.

Actually, the FAS has been conducting the proceedings with Booking.com for a long time. At the beginning of 2019, the public association of entrepreneurs "Support of Russia" complained about the service. 

And at the end of last year, the service found Booking.com guilty, and now they have decided on the punishment. Moreover, the FAS decided to impose a turnover fine - 11 and a half percent of Booking.com's annual turnover in Russia. And this seems to be a record punishment for foreign IT companies in our country.

Booking.com predictably considers the fine to be unfair and will appeal the decision. In this case, the success of the appeal depends on whether the service can be considered a monopolist in Russia or not. According to the FAS, it accounts for 80 percent of the hotel aggregator market. The company claims that this cannot be considered, since users can always book a room not through an aggregator, but directly at the hotel. However, now she will have to prove it in court. And, probably, not only in Russia - the antimonopoly authorities of other countries - Germany and, for example, Israel, for example - have exactly the same claims to Booking.com.

Well, just a few hours earlier, Roskomnadzor immediately fined WhatsApp, Twitter and Facebook for refusing to localize user data in Russia. This is the first fine for WhatsApp, he was assigned 4 million rubles. For Twitter and Facebook - already repeated, they were assigned 17 and 15 million, respectively. It is significant that so far these services are only fined - but not blocked. For the same reason, 3 years ago, Russia closed access to the business social network LinkedIn.