Summary
Google has reclassified the U.S. as a “sensitive country” following Trump’s announcement to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” and Mount Denali as Mount McKinley.
The designation, typically reserved for nations with border disputes or strict governments, reflects the growing challenges tech companies face under Trump’s second term.
Google Maps has prioritized updating these name changes, treating them similarly to disputed regions like the Persian Gulf.
The reclassification may impact how Google handles U.S. geographic labels moving forward.
NOAA government nautical chart from today:
The executive order gave something like 3 months for the secretary of interior to rename it. Trump’s guy hasnt been confirmed as secretary of interior.
I would typically roll my eyes at something like this, but in less than two weeks Trump has taken great strides towards destroying the federal civil service, any semblance of a rules-based international order and our relationships abroad, while doing everything but publicly endorsing violence against his political opponents.
May be an unpopular opinion, but Google is right! It may also be that I’ve only read the headlines and am totally off-base, but ….
It’s not google’s business to decide what to call things, nor would they want any controversies attached to it. Every country and internationally has data with what they want to call things. It’s their right to do so, even snowflake countries trying to erase cultures and history. It’s in Google’s best interest to implement exactly what those official data sources call things, presumably those have gone through whatever due process exists, without regard to what they think is right or wrong. If there’s evidence of the country being a special snowflake, or launching a flurry of changes, it’s in Googles interest to implement those changes more quickly, but NOT to take matters into their own hands
This reminds of how when the unicode consortium had to add flag emojis, instead of opening the can of worms on what countries are independent or not, they just noped out of it and let the implementers decide which combinations of regional indicator letters render as country flags.
Meanwhile, Google Maps shows Gulf of America now… So, take it with a grain of crack.
I live in the US in a very red state and mine still shows “Gulf of Mexico”
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The USA, Russia, China… birds of a feather
Colonialize together?
I’m going to start calling it the Gulf of Cuba.
He ruined the song!
We fired our guns and the British kept a-comin’
There wasn’t as many as there was a while ago
We fired once more and they began to runnin’
On down the Mississippi to the Gulf of America
Maybe if Google spent more time developing Gemini rather than renaming bodies of water they’d have a better product than the cheaper, more open DeepSeek.
LLMs are snake oil. All of them.
