"By saying "common", we mean to include names which are in widespread daily use, rather than giving immediate recognition to any arbitrary governmental re-naming. In other words, if a ruler announced that henceforth the Pacific Ocean would be named after her mother, we would not add that placemark unless and until the name came into common usage. "
They violated their own policy with the gulf then.
This is an interesting question to ask of any company. Every company over a long period is a Ship of Theseus. Google started out as a rowboat and now it is an ocean liner.
Investment in product quality, "Don't be evil", everything that set a company apart and allowed it to rise, it lasts only as long as it is preserved in a way that resists decay.
Is there anything left of the rowboat? I'm at the point where I am actively trying to shut Google out of my life to the degree that it is possible. And yet it is still not Microsoft. I catch a glimmer of the old google in a product release now and then.
And as a reminder to folks he's the writer of (the newer era) Westworld which if you haven't seen the full first season really turns into an incredible mind bender
Not just out of touch, but downright psychopathic in my opinion. I used to greatly admire Larry Page. He seemed like a really smart, driven, level-headed guy. When the news came out that he was basically fine with AI wiping out humanity, as it would just be the natural evolution of intelligence, and to fight against that would be "speciesist", all I good think was "what a psycho".
And I really don't think I'm exaggerating Page's opinion on this, though I'm happy to be corrected if I'm wrong.
Incredible back story here if I can trust Gemini on this as that dates back to over 10 years ago when Musk accused Larry Page of being too obsessed with bringing about AI and hence co-founds OpenAI... the irony of course being that OpenAI raced ahead while Google has been conservative
It seems their actual policy is "the policy of Primary Local Usage":
"Under this policy, the English Google Earth client displays the primary, common, local name(s) given to a body of water by the sovereign nations that border it. If all bordering countries agree on the name, then the common single name is displayed (e.g. "Caribbean Sea" in English, "Mar Caribe" in Spanish, etc.). But if different countries dispute the proper name for a body of water, our policy is to display both names, with each label placed closer to the country or countries that use it."
Which basically means "multiple names until all bordering countries agree on the same name", if I'm not mistaken
The problem here is that the "primary, common, local" name used in a country sometimes conflicts with what specific government institutions in those countries may "officially" use.
In the situation with the Gulf, it's unambiguously true that the "primary, common, local" name used in the US by English-speaking Americans is "Gulf of Mexico", but they decided to adhere to an artificial name change declared by a political figure, whose authority to make that "official" only extends to a single branch of a single level of government.
Not only that, but the only area he's authorised to name is a stretch of the US coastline and its EEZ.
He has no authority to name international bodies of water - i.e the large part in the centre where Google should be writing "Gulf of Mexico" because that's its name.
But he does have the ability to cause trouble for the giant corporations based in his country that serve map images to most of the rest of the world. The giant corporations also see that he grants favours for fealty. So it's actually the unofficial power he has that's the problem, rather than what's within his legal remit.
> "In the situation with the Gulf, it's unambiguously true that the "primary, common, local" name used in the US"
And that's my point. It depends on how "primary" or "common" is defined, the article has no definition of it. Who gets to decide that, Google?
The easy (and predictable) cop-out is to follow a governments definition of what is "the expected primary and common name", and then show that name in brackets.
The only restriction this "definition" seems to set is that your country needs to be adjacent to the landmark to define its name, so "a ruler" cannot decide to rename e.g. Australia unless he is either "the ruler" of Australia or of a country adjacent to it.
And we're back to square one.
--
EDIT: Yes, I also read this sentence: "By saying "common", we mean to include names which are in widespread daily use, rather than giving immediate recognition to any arbitrary governmental re-naming.".
The question remains how to quantify "widespread daily use".
It creates room to justify against an immediate change of a name, but doesn't define when this criteria is reached.
And from all I see, all this doesn't seem to matter anyway, because a new local naming will anyway be added in brackets (see Gulf of Mexico). What am I missing?
The article does have definitions of both primary and common, though:
> By saying "primary", we aim to include names of dominant use, rather than having to add every conceivable local nickname or variation. By saying "common", we mean to include names which are in widespread daily use, rather than giving immediate recognition to any arbitrary governmental re-naming. In other words, if a ruler announced that henceforth the Pacific Ocean would be named after her mother, we would not add that placemark unless and until the name came into common usage.
Which is consistent with Wikipedia's naming policy, and the Wikipedia community already puts in the effort to sort out what primary names to use for things.
If Google doesn't want to try to discern the proper "primary, local, common" names on their own, they do worse than just using Wikipedia's names and call it a day.
It's a very lawyerly distinction you're making here that's willfully blind to what's really going on. The common-sense reading "primary, common, local name" is that it should be called the Gulf of Mexico, as that is what it is called in the USA.
If the nutso president of Turkmenistan decided one day that the Caspian Sea's real name was the Turkmen Sea, there's absolutely no way that Google Maps would rename it on their maps. The reason they renamed it in this case is not because "well, the government said so, so we have no choice!". It's (obviously!) done to not piss of Trump, and pissing off Trump would be bad for their business. They can hide behind lawyerly arguing all they want, but that is the real reason.
I'm not so sure on the Turkmen Sea example. Google is (trying to) sidestep this issue as much as possible by making the name on the map depend on your physical location, language and localization settings, or both. They could easily make the Caspian Sea say Turkmen Sea only in Turkmenistan, and probably would if they wanted to keep doing business in Turkmenistan. This is already how it works for Lake Ontario: if I access from the US, it says "Lake America", but if I VPN to somewhere in Europe, it says "Lake Ontario (Lake America)".
In terms of lawyerly distinctions, I would actually argue that there is still no legal basis to the rename. The president has directed the federal executive branch to refer to Lake Ontario as Lake America, but...that's it. It literally doesn't and can't apply to Google. No law has been passed, and even if there had been it's pretty clear that it's a 1st Amendment issue to compel private entities to refer to things in particular ways -- it would be a slam dunk even on this Supreme Court. Their decision to do it is a voluntary act meant to curry favor with this administration, or at least to avoid pissing it off. This isn't like the Indian laws that make it illegal to publish a map that shows Kashmir as part of Pakistan, it's just a memo to the federal bureaucracy. Yes, this doesn't really matter because there are punishments that are within the power of the president (like cancelling contracts, or cooking up bogus DoJ investigations, or failing to resist antitrust enforcement, etc.) that they want to avoid. This just goes to illustrate that the rule of law in the United States is mostly a fantasy.
I guess the "Maps" Team follows a different policy than the "Earth" team...
Although there is also no definition of "common usage". A new name might already qualify if the local government adjacent to this landmark announces to only use this new name from now on.
Reading the article, I assume this would cause the new name to be immediately shown in brackets next to the old name, or am I missing something?
The moment the president of the US renamed those bodies of water, it became commonly used in all sort of publications since then. It fits their description, no matter how silly.
Yes, a lot of publications reported on the presidents action. I do not have the same experience as you that there's widespread use of the alternative name outside of this context.
Wow, thanks for pointing this out. I'll do a mea culpa then. I was uncomfortable making Google the final arbiter of place names, as I didn't find a good reason why we should trust Google more than the democratically elected government of our country.
But I really like this policy. Even though it still relies on Google's definition of "common usage", it makes naming much less arbitrary and more sensical.
I was wrong in my previous analysis. Google had a clear, sensible, defined, published policy, and they broke it to appease a wannabe autocrat.
It's an american company, whatever they say come with an asterisk saying whatever they say it depends on what the powers in the USA decide (and it's the same for other countries with their own companies).
Anyway I don't think google should be the one choosing the names they call water bodies. They just need to use the official names for the IPs countries, and show lake america, gulf of america, ocean america, asian america, european america and african america if Trump makes it official, but only for the US IPs.
The great state of Indiana once declared that pi was equal to exactly 3.2. [0]
Should they also break all of their code by adhering to that falsehood because it was politically expedient?
Nah. Truth is a real thing, and I want to live in a world were facts are not dictated to us by failed gameshow hosts who happened to turn political in their retirement years.
I don't know... I tend to agree with you (especially in this case), but I can also see cases where that's actually not what I'd expect. My hometown has a square that everyone knows as the "tribunal square" (which used to be its official name), but that's not been its official name in decades and about 30% of people don't even know the current official name, yet I would expect a map to refer to it by its current official name and not "tribunal square".
Maybe not quite the same as in this case, the entity who names the square actually owns the square, which isn't the case in the gulf of mexico naming situation. But there is some grey area I think.
That's why I wrote official. If the US as a country and as an institution change the name of a place, it is neither the problem nor the role of google to decide if it is good or not. I would not be happy if my president decided to rename the united kingdom to the îles normandes (normandy isles), but I do think that once official google should change the name
> "show lake america, gulf of america, ocean america, asian america, european america and african america if Trump makes it official, but only for the US IP"
I would maybe even welcome that approach at this stage, just to demonstrate the absurdity of those decisions.
They could actively encourage also other countries to rename all foreign landmarks as they please, to fast-track a separate "international naming" convention so people can again communicate across borders...
@dang: title's off; the blog post is titled "How Google determines the names for bodies of water in Google Earth."
The how is operative, I think, since it changes the title from being about the process of how Google determines a name when it's there, to being about Google acting as some kind of rogue despot that goes around naming bodies of water.
For a website focused on the latest and most sophisticated tech, I'm continually surprised at how clunky and "dumb" the various post title filters here are.
This article is not as pure as it might seem but I think this is also a post-hoc reasoning to explain what decision they went with for the "Persian Gulf" / "Arabian Gulf" decision, and Google then proceeded to change their stance on that in the following years:
"Google had previously put both Persian Gulf and Arabian Gulf on its Google Maps. After May 2012, it removed both names from the body of water stating that it does not name every place in the world and that it did not want to take a political stance. Iranians complained about the change and started a Twitter campaign asking "Where's the Persian Gulf?".[66] Since 2016, Google Maps has displayed both Persian Gulf and Arabian Gulf on the body of water and shows "either Arabian or Persian Gulf to local users, depending on geolocation and language settings."[67] Google Earth shows both names, unless viewed through a server from a Gulf Coast Arab country, in which case it labels it simply "Arabian Gulf"."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_Gulf_naming_dispute#:~...
Evidently Google in bending the knee with the America naming but I think they also haven't exactly taken a purely principled stance in the past either
> But if different countries dispute the proper name for a body of water, our policy is to display both names, with each label placed closer to the country or countries that use it.
Clearly that policy has changed since 2008. Not surprising, since that's before they decided to officially be evil.
Well technically it also says that in Japan they only display "Sea of Japan" in the local language (Japanese), so displaying just "Gulf of America" in the local language follows. This blog never expected that the USA would be involved in this kind of dispute.
Well if you think about it the “don’t be evil” slogan was never really true in the first place.
The expansion of the internet advertising industry, addiction algorithms via YouTube and/or other dark patterns, and more were pretty evil from the start. If you need a slogan to remind you to not be evil, maybe you shouldn’t be anywhere near power. It’s one of those tells in advertising - if you have to tell me you are something you probably aren’t whatever you are claiming to be.
Renaming Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America, and renaming Lake Ontario to Lake America just aren’t in the same room in terms of “evil” things. Annoying perhaps? Sure. Evil? Not. A. Chance.
Nobody really cares about this stuff in day-to-day life besides people who desire to be outraged as a way of entertaining themselves or mask over some other personal deficiency they have.
What countries call it the South China Sea? What does France call the English Channel?
Had this occurred 100 years ago we wouldn’t even be talking about it today.
Looks like the French name for the English Channel is La Manche (The Sleeve) and many other countries follow this name. Whatever you think of renaming things, however, the policy of giving all the names for a place was a good one.
And then there are European countries that just use a combination. Germany has 'Ärmelkanal' (literally: sleeve channel). If you can't make everyone happy, make everyone angry.
It's an ok policy. For example I don't want to see "Chinese Taiwan/Republic of Taiwan" when I view Taiwan on a map as an America. It's just Taiwan to me and I'm not concerned with what people from other countries call it.
Same thing basically with the English Channel. It's just the English Channel. I don't want to see a bunch of different names for it. If the French want Google to show it as La Manche for French people that makes sense.
"We want Google Earth to merit users' trust as an authoritative reference..."
I guess they've changed their minds since 2008... Their display of "Gulf of America" without "Gulf of Mexico" and "Lake America" without "Lake Ontario" is at odds with their declared policy.
Of course, the solution described here is not a perfect one, (as perfect solutions don't really exist when it comes to messy human things like international politics) but it at least follows from an easy to identify set of principles on how ambiguous situations like these should be handled.
Then you look at the current day with the "Gulf of America" which fails to be primary, common, or local, and just get disappointed.
So wild to be living in a time where the most powerful man in the world is very obviously turning senile and those that surround him choose to indulge his outbursts rather than address the problem.
This is the one I find most hilarious, as Ontario was named after the lake, not the other way around. So the temper tantrum reaction in trying to spite Canada wholly misses the mark.
That seems to be the pattern, US visitors get only the stupid new name while visitors outside the US get the Old Name (New/US Name). It's consistent across Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario.
I see Golfe du Mexique (Golfe d'Amerique) from France in gmaps, and golfe du mexique/gulf of mexico/golfo des mexico on the maps supported by leaflet (depending on the provider)
I (in Germany) get "Lake Ontario (Lake America)" too, as well as "Golf von Mexiko (Golf von Amerika)". Maybe so the AfD leaders don't tell on Google to their pal Trump?
Tech companies spent decades trying to sell themselves as an enlightened class of nobel philosopher kings.
This going all the way back to John Perry Barlow and a utopia in cyberspace to escape the right wing world of Reagan and Thatcher. But it reached its zenith around the "Arab Spring" with the idea that through connecting people the tech companies were giving voice to the voiceless and creating a new world of participatory democracy.
Many of us developed an interest in technology substantially because of the promise they were selling
Yet then, the moment they received the tiniest bit of pushback they all threw in fully and enthusiastically with Trump and are now even facilitating the Right Wing Internationale as we see with the Zuck trying to silence Lula supporters in Brazil.
It's basically the mother of all rug pulls and yeah, people are a little sore
mh, there's some truth to this, but I think it's much more that a split emerged in the community. There was originally a coalition between the social progressive movement and the techno-liberal/libertarian STEM side.
But all the stuff that happened from 2012 to 2024 had disenfranchised a lot of the actual engineers that do the real work with the progressive movement. There were a lot of early warnings, but they were ignored and instead silenced via social pressure.
Now the progressives are shocked that they couldn't just ratchet their causes ever further without losing support.
And it is crazy who the techno-libertarian side joined forces with, but it was also obvious this was bound to happen at some point. You can't just continually ignore the grievances of your allies and then be shocked when they turn against you.
Yes. There is some old regex (probably written 20 years ago) which automatically tries to improve the titles. One of the more silly rules is to remove "how" from the beginning.
> Donald Trump said Google rejected his request to rename the Atlantic Ocean after himself or America. Speaking at a rally in South Carolina on Wednesday, the president said he had called Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, to ask whether the company could “handle” his proposal.
>According to Trump, Pichai rejected the latest proposal. Trump described the Google CEO’s response by saying, “No, no, no. This time I’m not doing it … Oceans are different, sir. They cover … a lot of countries. Please don’t ask us to do that.”
> As the publishers of a geographic reference tool, we believe that Google should not choose sides in international geopolitical disputes. For this reason, we've chosen to implement a uniform policy of Primary Local Usage.
Yeah, right, until a wannabe despot comes in and demands Google come lick its boots. In which case Google immediately complies with zero objection.
No, no, not "a" wannabe despot - specifically one from the United States and possibly Cina. You can be certain they would not care about the demands of, say, the president of Cuba.
I believe it took less than three days, based on a quick search [0][1]. I did not read in detail to find out how much less.
It seems a clearer case of following a similar policy (though for land, not water), since Denali was already the primary, common, and local name for the mountain in Alaska, just not across the US as a whole [2]. I am not aware of the Gulf of America or Lake America as common names; the Gulf of America was occasionally a joke, though.
It's also not clear to me that it's fair to say "the Democrats renamed some mountain," since it was partly a clear response to an Alaskan request, made by both the Republican and Democratic Senators of Alaska [3], although the officials who made the final decision were all Democrats.
The name of the mountain was changed. Note that mountains aren’t bodies of water, so the link is not relevant to this question, and Denali isn’t bordered by multiple countries, so Google presumably feels that the US has the right to name it.
And you’re getting downvoted because, as per the above, it’s an irrelevant question.
But I’ll indulge you just a bit more. The principle here is not “renaming things is bad!” The principle is that indulging an authoritarian who’s trying to unilaterally rename territory his country doesn’t own is bad, particularly when he’s doing so in a fit of pique (Lake Ontario).
As you may or may not be aware (I wasn’t), the Alaskan state legislature passed a bill in 1975 requesting that the mountain be renamed. Trump didn’t even try to get Congress to pass any bills before renaming things.
Hope this all helps clarify and gives you some reason to rethink the MAGA propaganda that tries to equate Denali and the Gulf of Mexico.
Not GP, but thank you those are interesting points.
However I think you're assuming/reading into the question a whole lot more than is there. Unfortunately your otherwise good answer comes across very hostile because you are assuming (rightly or wrongly) that the asker is parroting MAGA propaganda. I can assure you I am very much not MAGA, yet I thought it was a good question because it's interesting to see if/when Google stopped their 2008 policy and why. Your "why" makes sense to me, but you almost lost me with stuff like, "Hope this all helps clarify and gives you some reason to rethink the MAGA propaganda that tries to equate Denali and the Gulf of Mexico" which feels completely unwarranted.
I don’t think there’s a right or wrong about whether or not the asker is parroting MAGA propaganda; the Denali false equivalence is absolutely something that comes up all the time in right-wing circles. Possibly the asker didn’t intend to parrot MAGA propaganda. If so, well, perhaps there’s a lesson here for them about reading carefully before posting. I don’t think it’s unresonable to ask HN posters to read the article with some care and again, Denali is in no way an equivalent situation.
This article on the Google blog is about naming disputes between countries, not name changes driven by changing political winds within the same country. Of course, you know that and you're just trolling, which also explains why the comment is downvoted. You're welcome.
I have the same question. What did happen? Did Google just change it or did they display both like the 2008 policy?
This seems like a question that should be able to factually answer with something like, "they changed it and did not include both names" or "they changed it but included both names". I don't see how it's a troll to wonder about that.
Please re-read the policy. You will notice that it refers to “bodies of water” and “international geopolitical disputes.” Denali is neither a body of water or the subject of any international disagreement, given that it’s contained within the borders of the US. I believe Google just changed it, but you can see why the question is not in fact relevant to the current discussion.
American president can ask many things. Trump could ask an american citizen he wants to enter his property. The citizen can say "Fuck off you fucking moron" and slam the door in Trump's face since it is the citizen's personal property. So just saying the American president asked something doesn't necessarily mean you have to do that. If a citzen runs a map software, he is free to name that waterbody The Gulf of Orange Pedo if he wishes to, etc.
>American president can ask many things. Trump could ask an american citizen he wants to enter his property. The citizen can say "Fuck off you fucking moron" and slam the door in Trump's face since it is the citizen's personal property.
You will discover, as I have discovered, that it's not so easy to sever ties with people you dislike. Prepare yourself for a life of forced entanglement with some of the dumbest, most reckless people in society. They'll worm their way back into your lives, just to punish you.
"By saying "common", we mean to include names which are in widespread daily use, rather than giving immediate recognition to any arbitrary governmental re-naming. In other words, if a ruler announced that henceforth the Pacific Ocean would be named after her mother, we would not add that placemark unless and until the name came into common usage. "
They violated their own policy with the gulf then.
Same name, but the company is quite different. What of that old Google is left now?
This is an interesting question to ask of any company. Every company over a long period is a Ship of Theseus. Google started out as a rowboat and now it is an ocean liner.
Investment in product quality, "Don't be evil", everything that set a company apart and allowed it to rise, it lasts only as long as it is preserved in a way that resists decay.
Is there anything left of the rowboat? I'm at the point where I am actively trying to shut Google out of my life to the degree that it is possible. And yet it is still not Microsoft. I catch a glimmer of the old google in a product release now and then.
To quote Christopher Nolan: “You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”
Fun fact, according to C-Nol himself, his brother (Jonathan Nolan) wrote that line
And as a reminder to folks he's the writer of (the newer era) Westworld which if you haven't seen the full first season really turns into an incredible mind bender
I hear there's a janitor using the handle of one of the original paddles as a mop handle.
It's only there because it wasn't inventoried and so not lost in the purge.
The last two words of their old motto "don't be evil"
only the 2 founders, which seems have become quite out of touch lately
"The United Nations is a transparently antisemitic organisation" - Google Co Founder
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/07/08/sergey-...
He's a peach
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/09/29/politics/sergey-brin-cali...
Not just out of touch, but downright psychopathic in my opinion. I used to greatly admire Larry Page. He seemed like a really smart, driven, level-headed guy. When the news came out that he was basically fine with AI wiping out humanity, as it would just be the natural evolution of intelligence, and to fight against that would be "speciesist", all I good think was "what a psycho".
And I really don't think I'm exaggerating Page's opinion on this, though I'm happy to be corrected if I'm wrong.
Incredible back story here if I can trust Gemini on this as that dates back to over 10 years ago when Musk accused Larry Page of being too obsessed with bringing about AI and hence co-founds OpenAI... the irony of course being that OpenAI raced ahead while Google has been conservative
I'm still calling the axing of Google Reader the jump the shark moment!
It seems their actual policy is "the policy of Primary Local Usage":
"Under this policy, the English Google Earth client displays the primary, common, local name(s) given to a body of water by the sovereign nations that border it. If all bordering countries agree on the name, then the common single name is displayed (e.g. "Caribbean Sea" in English, "Mar Caribe" in Spanish, etc.). But if different countries dispute the proper name for a body of water, our policy is to display both names, with each label placed closer to the country or countries that use it."
Which basically means "multiple names until all bordering countries agree on the same name", if I'm not mistaken
The problem here is that the "primary, common, local" name used in a country sometimes conflicts with what specific government institutions in those countries may "officially" use.
In the situation with the Gulf, it's unambiguously true that the "primary, common, local" name used in the US by English-speaking Americans is "Gulf of Mexico", but they decided to adhere to an artificial name change declared by a political figure, whose authority to make that "official" only extends to a single branch of a single level of government.
Not only that, but the only area he's authorised to name is a stretch of the US coastline and its EEZ.
He has no authority to name international bodies of water - i.e the large part in the centre where Google should be writing "Gulf of Mexico" because that's its name.
But he does have the ability to cause trouble for the giant corporations based in his country that serve map images to most of the rest of the world. The giant corporations also see that he grants favours for fealty. So it's actually the unofficial power he has that's the problem, rather than what's within his legal remit.
> whose authority to make that "official" only extends to a single branch of a single level of government.
Yes, and Google has huge contracts with the government, meaning they must adhere to their rules if they want to keep those contracts.
> "In the situation with the Gulf, it's unambiguously true that the "primary, common, local" name used in the US"
And that's my point. It depends on how "primary" or "common" is defined, the article has no definition of it. Who gets to decide that, Google?
The easy (and predictable) cop-out is to follow a governments definition of what is "the expected primary and common name", and then show that name in brackets.
The only restriction this "definition" seems to set is that your country needs to be adjacent to the landmark to define its name, so "a ruler" cannot decide to rename e.g. Australia unless he is either "the ruler" of Australia or of a country adjacent to it.
And we're back to square one.
--
EDIT: Yes, I also read this sentence: "By saying "common", we mean to include names which are in widespread daily use, rather than giving immediate recognition to any arbitrary governmental re-naming.".
The question remains how to quantify "widespread daily use".
It creates room to justify against an immediate change of a name, but doesn't define when this criteria is reached.
And from all I see, all this doesn't seem to matter anyway, because a new local naming will anyway be added in brackets (see Gulf of Mexico). What am I missing?
The article does have definitions of both primary and common, though:
> By saying "primary", we aim to include names of dominant use, rather than having to add every conceivable local nickname or variation. By saying "common", we mean to include names which are in widespread daily use, rather than giving immediate recognition to any arbitrary governmental re-naming. In other words, if a ruler announced that henceforth the Pacific Ocean would be named after her mother, we would not add that placemark unless and until the name came into common usage.
Which is consistent with Wikipedia's naming policy, and the Wikipedia community already puts in the effort to sort out what primary names to use for things.
If Google doesn't want to try to discern the proper "primary, local, common" names on their own, they do worse than just using Wikipedia's names and call it a day.
It's a very lawyerly distinction you're making here that's willfully blind to what's really going on. The common-sense reading "primary, common, local name" is that it should be called the Gulf of Mexico, as that is what it is called in the USA.
If the nutso president of Turkmenistan decided one day that the Caspian Sea's real name was the Turkmen Sea, there's absolutely no way that Google Maps would rename it on their maps. The reason they renamed it in this case is not because "well, the government said so, so we have no choice!". It's (obviously!) done to not piss of Trump, and pissing off Trump would be bad for their business. They can hide behind lawyerly arguing all they want, but that is the real reason.
I'm not so sure on the Turkmen Sea example. Google is (trying to) sidestep this issue as much as possible by making the name on the map depend on your physical location, language and localization settings, or both. They could easily make the Caspian Sea say Turkmen Sea only in Turkmenistan, and probably would if they wanted to keep doing business in Turkmenistan. This is already how it works for Lake Ontario: if I access from the US, it says "Lake America", but if I VPN to somewhere in Europe, it says "Lake Ontario (Lake America)".
In terms of lawyerly distinctions, I would actually argue that there is still no legal basis to the rename. The president has directed the federal executive branch to refer to Lake Ontario as Lake America, but...that's it. It literally doesn't and can't apply to Google. No law has been passed, and even if there had been it's pretty clear that it's a 1st Amendment issue to compel private entities to refer to things in particular ways -- it would be a slam dunk even on this Supreme Court. Their decision to do it is a voluntary act meant to curry favor with this administration, or at least to avoid pissing it off. This isn't like the Indian laws that make it illegal to publish a map that shows Kashmir as part of Pakistan, it's just a memo to the federal bureaucracy. Yes, this doesn't really matter because there are punishments that are within the power of the president (like cancelling contracts, or cooking up bogus DoJ investigations, or failing to resist antitrust enforcement, etc.) that they want to avoid. This just goes to illustrate that the rule of law in the United States is mostly a fantasy.
I guess the "Maps" Team follows a different policy than the "Earth" team...
Although there is also no definition of "common usage". A new name might already qualify if the local government adjacent to this landmark announces to only use this new name from now on.
Reading the article, I assume this would cause the new name to be immediately shown in brackets next to the old name, or am I missing something?
> Although there is also no definition of "common usage".. am I missing something
Common usage is defined in the article as the widespread name used by the local people to refer to it.
The moment the president of the US renamed those bodies of water, it became commonly used in all sort of publications since then. It fits their description, no matter how silly.
Don't know why you are downvoted, that's how the whole article still can be interpreted.
The only change I can read from it, is that they don't need to apply a renaming from Day#1
[Citation needed]
Yes, a lot of publications reported on the presidents action. I do not have the same experience as you that there's widespread use of the alternative name outside of this context.
Wow, thanks for pointing this out. I'll do a mea culpa then. I was uncomfortable making Google the final arbiter of place names, as I didn't find a good reason why we should trust Google more than the democratically elected government of our country.
But I really like this policy. Even though it still relies on Google's definition of "common usage", it makes naming much less arbitrary and more sensical.
I was wrong in my previous analysis. Google had a clear, sensible, defined, published policy, and they broke it to appease a wannabe autocrat.
It's an american company, whatever they say come with an asterisk saying whatever they say it depends on what the powers in the USA decide (and it's the same for other countries with their own companies).
Anyway I don't think google should be the one choosing the names they call water bodies. They just need to use the official names for the IPs countries, and show lake america, gulf of america, ocean america, asian america, european america and african america if Trump makes it official, but only for the US IPs.
The great state of Indiana once declared that pi was equal to exactly 3.2. [0]
Should they also break all of their code by adhering to that falsehood because it was politically expedient?
Nah. Truth is a real thing, and I want to live in a world were facts are not dictated to us by failed gameshow hosts who happened to turn political in their retirement years.
[0] https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~alopez-o/math-faq/mathtext/node18.h...
Do you think Google should serve customers or politicians?
As a user I want the map names I know, not whatever BS some egomaniac politician announced yesterday.
I don't know... I tend to agree with you (especially in this case), but I can also see cases where that's actually not what I'd expect. My hometown has a square that everyone knows as the "tribunal square" (which used to be its official name), but that's not been its official name in decades and about 30% of people don't even know the current official name, yet I would expect a map to refer to it by its current official name and not "tribunal square".
Maybe not quite the same as in this case, the entity who names the square actually owns the square, which isn't the case in the gulf of mexico naming situation. But there is some grey area I think.
>Do you think Google should serve customers or politicians?
Why not ask the question this way.
Do you think Google should serve people with money in their hand or a gun to their head?
That's why I wrote official. If the US as a country and as an institution change the name of a place, it is neither the problem nor the role of google to decide if it is good or not. I would not be happy if my president decided to rename the united kingdom to the îles normandes (normandy isles), but I do think that once official google should change the name
> "show lake america, gulf of america, ocean america, asian america, european america and african america if Trump makes it official, but only for the US IP"
I would maybe even welcome that approach at this stage, just to demonstrate the absurdity of those decisions.
They could actively encourage also other countries to rename all foreign landmarks as they please, to fast-track a separate "international naming" convention so people can again communicate across borders...
Exactly, that's why en-us is different than en-gb, en-ca, or even en-jp.
@dang: title's off; the blog post is titled "How Google determines the names for bodies of water in Google Earth."
The how is operative, I think, since it changes the title from being about the process of how Google determines a name when it's there, to being about Google acting as some kind of rogue despot that goes around naming bodies of water.
For a website focused on the latest and most sophisticated tech, I'm continually surprised at how clunky and "dumb" the various post title filters here are.
Disclaimer: work for Google
This article is not as pure as it might seem but I think this is also a post-hoc reasoning to explain what decision they went with for the "Persian Gulf" / "Arabian Gulf" decision, and Google then proceeded to change their stance on that in the following years:
"Google had previously put both Persian Gulf and Arabian Gulf on its Google Maps. After May 2012, it removed both names from the body of water stating that it does not name every place in the world and that it did not want to take a political stance. Iranians complained about the change and started a Twitter campaign asking "Where's the Persian Gulf?".[66] Since 2016, Google Maps has displayed both Persian Gulf and Arabian Gulf on the body of water and shows "either Arabian or Persian Gulf to local users, depending on geolocation and language settings."[67] Google Earth shows both names, unless viewed through a server from a Gulf Coast Arab country, in which case it labels it simply "Arabian Gulf"." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_Gulf_naming_dispute#:~...
Evidently Google in bending the knee with the America naming but I think they also haven't exactly taken a purely principled stance in the past either
The key quote:
> But if different countries dispute the proper name for a body of water, our policy is to display both names, with each label placed closer to the country or countries that use it.
Clearly that policy has changed since 2008. Not surprising, since that's before they decided to officially be evil.
What has changed? On my Google Maps it shows as: Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America).
I'm located south of the equator.
It only shows Gulf of America if you’re in the US. It should, according to this policy, show both no matter where you are.
Well technically it also says that in Japan they only display "Sea of Japan" in the local language (Japanese), so displaying just "Gulf of America" in the local language follows. This blog never expected that the USA would be involved in this kind of dispute.
I'm in Germany, it shows me the real name, and the clownshow name. It does the same for Lake Ontario.
When I VPN to other countries, it does the same.
Not sure where you got your wisdom from.
Well if you think about it the “don’t be evil” slogan was never really true in the first place.
The expansion of the internet advertising industry, addiction algorithms via YouTube and/or other dark patterns, and more were pretty evil from the start. If you need a slogan to remind you to not be evil, maybe you shouldn’t be anywhere near power. It’s one of those tells in advertising - if you have to tell me you are something you probably aren’t whatever you are claiming to be.
Renaming Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America, and renaming Lake Ontario to Lake America just aren’t in the same room in terms of “evil” things. Annoying perhaps? Sure. Evil? Not. A. Chance.
Nobody really cares about this stuff in day-to-day life besides people who desire to be outraged as a way of entertaining themselves or mask over some other personal deficiency they have.
What countries call it the South China Sea? What does France call the English Channel?
Had this occurred 100 years ago we wouldn’t even be talking about it today.
Looks like the French name for the English Channel is La Manche (The Sleeve) and many other countries follow this name. Whatever you think of renaming things, however, the policy of giving all the names for a place was a good one.
And then there are European countries that just use a combination. Germany has 'Ärmelkanal' (literally: sleeve channel). If you can't make everyone happy, make everyone angry.
It's an ok policy. For example I don't want to see "Chinese Taiwan/Republic of Taiwan" when I view Taiwan on a map as an America. It's just Taiwan to me and I'm not concerned with what people from other countries call it.
Same thing basically with the English Channel. It's just the English Channel. I don't want to see a bunch of different names for it. If the French want Google to show it as La Manche for French people that makes sense.
"We want Google Earth to merit users' trust as an authoritative reference..."
I guess they've changed their minds since 2008... Their display of "Gulf of America" without "Gulf of Mexico" and "Lake America" without "Lake Ontario" is at odds with their declared policy.
Of course, the solution described here is not a perfect one, (as perfect solutions don't really exist when it comes to messy human things like international politics) but it at least follows from an easy to identify set of principles on how ambiguous situations like these should be handled.
Then you look at the current day with the "Gulf of America" which fails to be primary, common, or local, and just get disappointed.
So wild to be living in a time where the most powerful man in the world is very obviously turning senile and those that surround him choose to indulge his outbursts rather than address the problem.
Happens all the time.
I've heard it called Michael Jackson Syndrome.
He’s stolen billions of dollars and is too senile to protect it. Everyone’s angling for a piece of the grift.
I was literally swimming in Lake Ontario when I learned it was now Lake America. Nice capitulation, Google.
This is the one I find most hilarious, as Ontario was named after the lake, not the other way around. So the temper tantrum reaction in trying to spite Canada wholly misses the mark.
Looking at my Google Maps right now I see:
Lake Ontario (Lake America)
does it mean that the complete name change has been introduced only locally, in US?
That seems to be the pattern, US visitors get only the stupid new name while visitors outside the US get the Old Name (New/US Name). It's consistent across Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario.
I still see only "Lake Ontario" on my end (from Canada).
I see Golfe du Mexique (Golfe d'Amerique) from France in gmaps, and golfe du mexique/gulf of mexico/golfo des mexico on the maps supported by leaflet (depending on the provider)
I (in Germany) get "Lake Ontario (Lake America)" too, as well as "Golf von Mexiko (Golf von Amerika)". Maybe so the AfD leaders don't tell on Google to their pal Trump?
Well, that aged well!
Are we surprised that technology companies are extremely mercenary? Why?
Tech companies spent decades trying to sell themselves as an enlightened class of nobel philosopher kings.
This going all the way back to John Perry Barlow and a utopia in cyberspace to escape the right wing world of Reagan and Thatcher. But it reached its zenith around the "Arab Spring" with the idea that through connecting people the tech companies were giving voice to the voiceless and creating a new world of participatory democracy.
Many of us developed an interest in technology substantially because of the promise they were selling
Yet then, the moment they received the tiniest bit of pushback they all threw in fully and enthusiastically with Trump and are now even facilitating the Right Wing Internationale as we see with the Zuck trying to silence Lula supporters in Brazil.
It's basically the mother of all rug pulls and yeah, people are a little sore
mh, there's some truth to this, but I think it's much more that a split emerged in the community. There was originally a coalition between the social progressive movement and the techno-liberal/libertarian STEM side.
But all the stuff that happened from 2012 to 2024 had disenfranchised a lot of the actual engineers that do the real work with the progressive movement. There were a lot of early warnings, but they were ignored and instead silenced via social pressure.
Now the progressives are shocked that they couldn't just ratchet their causes ever further without losing support. And it is crazy who the techno-libertarian side joined forces with, but it was also obvious this was bound to happen at some point. You can't just continually ignore the grievances of your allies and then be shocked when they turn against you.
> techno-liberal/libertarian STEM side.
John Perry Barlow-esque techno libertarianism is dead.
Modern network state authoritarianism is unrecognizable from the perspective of old-style technolibertarians.
If you had told those people the modern silicon valley was working to build a Panopticon and sell it to the TLAs they would not have believed you!
The title of the post is actually:
> How Google determines the names for bodies of water in Google Earth
But the HN link is
> Google determines the names for bodies of water in Google Earth
Is this one of those cases where HN automatically changes the submission name? Because removing the `how` really changes the meaning here.
Yes, leading How in title is always removed and often leads to worse titles.
I don't like these magical (unexpected) solutions.
Yes. There is some old regex (probably written 20 years ago) which automatically tries to improve the titles. One of the more silly rules is to remove "how" from the beginning.
I would guess that author just shortened the title which was too long for hn?
No, HN has a braindead feature that autostrips certain words from titles.
Luckily, there are maps services that actually do keep the common local names: https://mapy.com/
Why the submission today OP?
Lots of related/relevant discussion 2 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49495947
I miss when we didn't have a deranged pedophile dementia patient in the white house...
American Ocean incoming?
I'm waiting for west america (asia and oceania) and east america (europe and africa). And maybe "very south america" for antarctica
https://xkcd.com/2256/
I think you might have missed the latest onion: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/22/trump-atlant...
Canada > America North
He's literally "joked" about it
Presumably related:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/22/trump-atlant...
> Donald Trump said Google rejected his request to rename the Atlantic Ocean after himself or America. Speaking at a rally in South Carolina on Wednesday, the president said he had called Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, to ask whether the company could “handle” his proposal.
>According to Trump, Pichai rejected the latest proposal. Trump described the Google CEO’s response by saying, “No, no, no. This time I’m not doing it … Oceans are different, sir. They cover … a lot of countries. Please don’t ask us to do that.”
How times have changed sigh
> As the publishers of a geographic reference tool, we believe that Google should not choose sides in international geopolitical disputes. For this reason, we've chosen to implement a uniform policy of Primary Local Usage.
Yeah, right, until a wannabe despot comes in and demands Google come lick its boots. In which case Google immediately complies with zero objection.
No, no, not "a" wannabe despot - specifically one from the United States and possibly Cina. You can be certain they would not care about the demands of, say, the president of Cuba.
What happened on Google Earth when the Democrats renamed some mountain a few years ago?
Also: Why is this comment downvoted?
I believe it took less than three days, based on a quick search [0][1]. I did not read in detail to find out how much less.
It seems a clearer case of following a similar policy (though for land, not water), since Denali was already the primary, common, and local name for the mountain in Alaska, just not across the US as a whole [2]. I am not aware of the Gulf of America or Lake America as common names; the Gulf of America was occasionally a joke, though.
It's also not clear to me that it's fair to say "the Democrats renamed some mountain," since it was partly a clear response to an Alaskan request, made by both the Republican and Democratic Senators of Alaska [3], although the officials who made the final decision were all Democrats.
[0] https://searchengineland.com/mount-mckinley-denali-google-bi... [1] https://www.doi.gov/node/17570 [2] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CRPT-113srpt93/html/CRPT... [3] https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/senate-bill/155
Apples and Oranges. Denali is and was a name used for thousands of years. Nobody suggested naming the mountain Mt Czolgosz.
Alaskans used Denali for generations, before and after it was arbitrarily named McKinley.
The name of the mountain was changed. Note that mountains aren’t bodies of water, so the link is not relevant to this question, and Denali isn’t bordered by multiple countries, so Google presumably feels that the US has the right to name it.
And you’re getting downvoted because, as per the above, it’s an irrelevant question.
But I’ll indulge you just a bit more. The principle here is not “renaming things is bad!” The principle is that indulging an authoritarian who’s trying to unilaterally rename territory his country doesn’t own is bad, particularly when he’s doing so in a fit of pique (Lake Ontario).
As you may or may not be aware (I wasn’t), the Alaskan state legislature passed a bill in 1975 requesting that the mountain be renamed. Trump didn’t even try to get Congress to pass any bills before renaming things.
Hope this all helps clarify and gives you some reason to rethink the MAGA propaganda that tries to equate Denali and the Gulf of Mexico.
Not GP, but thank you those are interesting points.
However I think you're assuming/reading into the question a whole lot more than is there. Unfortunately your otherwise good answer comes across very hostile because you are assuming (rightly or wrongly) that the asker is parroting MAGA propaganda. I can assure you I am very much not MAGA, yet I thought it was a good question because it's interesting to see if/when Google stopped their 2008 policy and why. Your "why" makes sense to me, but you almost lost me with stuff like, "Hope this all helps clarify and gives you some reason to rethink the MAGA propaganda that tries to equate Denali and the Gulf of Mexico" which feels completely unwarranted.
I don’t think there’s a right or wrong about whether or not the asker is parroting MAGA propaganda; the Denali false equivalence is absolutely something that comes up all the time in right-wing circles. Possibly the asker didn’t intend to parrot MAGA propaganda. If so, well, perhaps there’s a lesson here for them about reading carefully before posting. I don’t think it’s unresonable to ask HN posters to read the article with some care and again, Denali is in no way an equivalent situation.
This article on the Google blog is about naming disputes between countries, not name changes driven by changing political winds within the same country. Of course, you know that and you're just trolling, which also explains why the comment is downvoted. You're welcome.
I have the same question. What did happen? Did Google just change it or did they display both like the 2008 policy?
This seems like a question that should be able to factually answer with something like, "they changed it and did not include both names" or "they changed it but included both names". I don't see how it's a troll to wonder about that.
Please re-read the policy. You will notice that it refers to “bodies of water” and “international geopolitical disputes.” Denali is neither a body of water or the subject of any international disagreement, given that it’s contained within the borders of the US. I believe Google just changed it, but you can see why the question is not in fact relevant to the current discussion.
That's a fair point, thank you
It's a related question which clearly has some relevance here, even though the case is not completely analogous.
get over it already its gulf and lake of america
No more than Nebraska is now "Dipshit Central", see how that works?
Google is an American company. America's President asked the name be changed. Kinda stupid to accuse them of anything untoward.
Just following orders, eh?
Yes, this is exactly like the Holocaust
Google lied and claimed the change came from the USGS when the USGS metadata hadn't changed.
There exists no mechanism in the US for the president to force a private company to change the name of anything.
They did this to curry favor with the regime. It is naked sycophancy that shows exactly where the leadership of this company stands.
American president can ask many things. Trump could ask an american citizen he wants to enter his property. The citizen can say "Fuck off you fucking moron" and slam the door in Trump's face since it is the citizen's personal property. So just saying the American president asked something doesn't necessarily mean you have to do that. If a citzen runs a map software, he is free to name that waterbody The Gulf of Orange Pedo if he wishes to, etc.
>American president can ask many things. Trump could ask an american citizen he wants to enter his property. The citizen can say "Fuck off you fucking moron" and slam the door in Trump's face since it is the citizen's personal property.
I'm sure that's not how it would go.
You will discover, as I have discovered, that it's not so easy to sever ties with people you dislike. Prepare yourself for a life of forced entanglement with some of the dumbest, most reckless people in society. They'll worm their way back into your lives, just to punish you.