How Google determines the names for bodies of water in Google Earth (2008)

"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

Literally no person not suffering a mental health crisis seriously calls these bodies of water GoA or LA. You could not find a single healthy adult on the Great Lakes who says anything other than Lake Ontario.

Absurd from Google and frankly they need to be punished. I want corporations to be scared of wading into politics again.

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?

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.

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 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.

I'm located south of the equator.

I've heard it called Michael Jackson Syndrome.

Lake Ontario (Lake America)

does it mean that the complete name change has been introduced only locally, in US?

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

I don't like these magical (unexpected) solutions.

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

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.

This sounds to me like for all users it should display both names. Perhaps to US users it displays "Gulf of America (Gulf of Mexico)" and everywhere else it displays "Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)", although the literal text suggests it should say "Gulf of Mexico" in an area of the map closest to Mexico and "Gulf of America" in an area of the map closest to the US.

Just because the US has decided to smear faeces on their walls doesn't mean we all need to admire it.

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.