> 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.
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.
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.
But I'd say that it's probably not a big deal anyway because how often are you going to run into such a scenario, and even if you do how would Google/whoever capture a lot of informal names for things? A little bit of confusion is fine too anyway.
I'm located south of the equator.
When I VPN to other countries, it does the same.
Not sure where you got your wisdom from.
Lake Ontario (Lake America)
does it mean that the complete name change has been introduced only locally, in US?
Google's capitulation is purely out of a combination of fear of retribution and the desire to suck up to power due to greed.
They violated their own policy with the gulf then.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/07/08/sergey-...
Like greedy Brin here has donated around $4B to charity that has gone to all manner of public good. Philanthropic organizations like his tend to be pretty efficient with getting good bang for their buck.
Had he given it to the government, which I'm sure you would call reason for celebration, well some of it would have gone to helping people directly, but most would have gone into protracted bureaucracy where just the rind ends up at the final objective. I'm actually pretty sure you yourself could write a decent list of government expenses that you would not want that money to go to.
In fact if you wrote a list of things that you would like it to go to, I'm pretty confident it would have very high overlap with what Brin does give to.
So what again are we trying to call out here? He's greedy?
Alright, lets give it a try:
- Wealth Tax
- Taxes of all sorts and kinds
What percentage of overlap do we have? I have a feeling it's zero.
> So what again are we trying to call out here? He's greedy?
We're trying to call out that working against a wealth tax because it'd impact you personally (since you're wealthy), is greedy behavior and greed is generally something most humans want to reduce, just like most of us wants less violence. We call people who favor greed and violence "bad people".
$4B out of $250B = +1.6% tax rate
And total over all years, not annual.
So no, charity fig leaf doesn't cover being a dick and fighting a meaningful wealth tax.
Out of ~40 million people in California, the impact of this tax seems to be about ~250 individuals. If they were considering users of their products and services, wouldn't that amount of users compared to the entire user base, be considered almost a rounding error?
The quality of argumentation here. “Wealth tax therefore good” “just pass it even though it’s shitty, who cares.”
How many bad laws are on the books and now it’s nearly impossible to claw them back?
$100m (focused on a single issue!) buys a lot of influence.
It's a problem that extends far beyond this one example, but this one example is a good example.
Semites are also e.g. Arabs. It comes from linguistic science and denotes people speaking Hebraic, Arabic or new-Aramaic languages. Look up the philologist August Ludwig von Schlözer who coined the term if that is new to you.
Also, criticizing a country is something very normal.
When one criticizes the Japan of 1930 to 1945 ... was this anti-zen? Or anti-nipponic? Or was it about their government?
When one criticizes the Syria of 1971-1924 ... what this anti-islamistic? Or anti-arabic? Or was it about their government, specifically their dictator?
When one criticizes the Israel of recent times ... is this anti-jewish? Or anti-semitic? Or is it about their government and various movements in said country?
It's only when we criticize the Israel government that suddenly people intermix politics with religion. And also with belonging to long extinct tribe groups. Or that they blame e.g. a synagogue congregation in Denmark with human-right violations of Israel settlers. Suddenly people stop being able to differentiate.
I see that there are countries that are anti-jewish (like Iran). And Persians aren't Semites, so maybe they are also anti-semitic, I can't judge this. But neither Iran nor Yemen or other puppet-organizations like the Hezbollah rule the UN. I'm quite sure that they can't even nudge the UN.
So claiming that the UN is anti-semitic is un-factional. I have seen zero evidence, and the people claiming this haven't brought up any evidence. The most they can bring up is that some UN sub-organization doesn't do the exact bidding of the current Israel government. Or that some UN sub-organization has the occasional mole or spy amongst them ... but hey, I don't want to know how many organizations have the odd moles or spy from the Mossad in them. That doesn't make them wholly israel-controlled.
It was dismaying to see this flagged so fast. When I reached out to the moderators about it they felt that it should remain flagged for reasons that seemed dubious and inconsistent imho.
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.
While some of those traits may be prone to antisocial behavior, given the right social cooking conditions, they are also natural so I don't think people with those traits shouldn't be considered "cooked" from from brith either.
There are also seemingly neurotypical people who win the lottery and get cooked, I think it mostly comes from alienation because wealth changes how others around you act.
To these people it starts to feel obvious that Ayn Rand was right, because Ayn Rand would have agreed with them. They come to feel that they were rewarded because they are more righteous than others, and they are more righteous than others because they were rewarded. Capitalism becomes a religion, rather than a means to an end and money becomes it's own goal instead of a symbolic token that represents real wealth. The piece of paper is now worth more than the things it can buy.
Eventually, due to the broken feedback loop that social order was meant to provide but no longer does, they lose the common moral boundaries that tie them to other men completely and become a special kind of sociopath.
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.
Person of Interest was probably the first example of superintelligent AI that actually left me thinking that it could really happen (and with the conclusion that this was not a priori a good or bad thing).
It's only there because it wasn't inventoried and so not lost in the purge.
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?
Common usage is defined in the article as the widespread name used by the local people to refer to it.
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.
The only change I can read from it, is that they don't need to apply a renaming from Day#1
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.
As a user I want the map names I know, not whatever BS some egomaniac politician announced yesterday.
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.
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?
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...
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...
Whether the bill was passed is ultimately irrelevant.
"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
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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 also assumed that that was happening, and that might even have made sense, but according to my Canadian coworker, Lake Ontario also shows up as Lake America for him.
Yes, and Google has huge contracts with the government, meaning they must adhere to their rules if they want to keep those contracts.
The terms of the legal contract they both would have signed.
Companies generally don't get to do business with the US Government without following their strict rules.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, right, until a wannabe despot comes in and demands Google come lick its boots. In which case Google immediately complies with zero objection.
Following local laws is not so bad. What's bad is when they politically support these despots after previously stating ideological opposition to similar despots in other countries. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/27/us/politics/sergey-brin-g...
> 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.
I don't like these magical (unexpected) solutions.
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
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.
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!
I think they would have absolutely believed it - that's what they were worried about and fought against. They would have not believed that libertarians and progressives (to use the terms of this thread) have adopted such an absolutely helpless, defeatest attitude and have therefore become moribund and ineffective.
Then you look at the current day with the "Gulf of America" which fails to be primary, common, or local, and just get disappointed.
The duty to disobey illegal orders is connected to the Holocaust but existed long before and applies to many other situations.
Just because a situation is not exactly the Holocaust DOES NOT mean that it's fine for people to abdicate personal responsibility by saying they're just following orders.
You do understand that right?
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.
Idk what timeline you're looking at, but if they knew it was changing anyway, might as well.
Also, the President in many ways has a lot of control over all three branches of government. Do they really want to risk contracts because USGS hasn't technically been updated yet?
But the USGS database (GNIS) did not update when Google (and Apple) changed the name. Google's claim that they pulled from GNIS was untrue
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/google-maps-renames-...
So again, it looks like they changed it to align to an upcoming change to official sources. They probably should not have claimed it was wholly dependent on USGS.
I'm sure that's not how it would go.
I've heard it called Michael Jackson Syndrome.
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.
The Spanish proverb “en casa de herrero, cuchillo de palo” (literally: "in the blacksmith's house, a wooden knife") means that the things you would most expect someone to have or fix are often missing or neglected in their own home or life
I always thought it was a statement about poverty, but online sources say it's about not applying one's expertise to one's own situation. I'm not sure I agree with that interpretation.
That's not really what we are :) It's part of what we talk about, sure, but mostly we're a site for curious conversation.
We actually don't want to automate things in ways that seem “polished” and “perfect” all the time. Which individual or software system would we want to be the arbiter of that? We like that the software does a rough approximation in cases like these, then through collaboration between the community and the moderators we arrive the best outcome in the end.
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.
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.”
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
Lots of related/relevant discussion 2 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49495947
Policies change and evolve. What would be more notable would be if they didn't.
And in this case, I'm not surprised at all. Trying to be the arbiter of what is considered common place names feels like a thankless and ultimately impossible task. If I were Google, I would quickly give up on that as well and simply follow official sources.
Don't like it? Then vote for the other guy next election. That's what living in a democracy is about. If anything, sticking to government names gives people even more reason to vote for the other party next election. The more people who get exposed to these dumb name changes on Google Maps, the better.
Is anyone actually able to verify this behavior? All I'm seeing is the Trumpy names no matter where I look.
> For language clients other than English, we display only the preferred name in the relevant language. For example, the Japanese client of Google Earth shows "Sea of Japan" in Japanese (日本海), while the Korean version shows "East Sea" in Korean (동해).
There are no laws or rules which require Google or any other private entity to use whatever names Trump came up with. That’s just not how it works
United Nations Cartographic Section
U.N. Conference on the Standardization of Geographical Names
International Hydrographic Organization (IHO)
US National Geographic Society
UK Royal Geographical Societyhttps://www.theverge.com/policy/1013485/trump-google-kiss-my...
"While listing off his accomplishments, he mentioned his decision to rename the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario.
"I called Google, Google Maps. See, Google wouldn't have taken my call in the first term. Now they kiss my ass.""