Google is right to change Gulf of Mexico’s name in its Maps app in the US

Google will change the names of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America and revert Denali to Mount McKinley in its Maps app, aligning it with one of President Donald Trump’s weird ideas.

Someone dug up a 2008 post from Google’s public policy blog where the then-global director of the sector talks about this very issue — “How Google determines the names for bodies of water in Google Earth.”

Google has a uniform policy they call “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.

In other languages, Google uses the common name in the language that Google Maps/Earth is being displayed in, along with an expandable button that lets you know the name isn’t universally agreed upon and lists other names that are also used.

That’s where people are giving Google a hard time, as they have (or used to have?) a policy that adopted the criteria of “primary, common, local” names for bodies of water:

[…] 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.

On X, the company responded to the criticism by saying they have “a longstanding practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources.”

In the case of the US, that would be the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS). Note that the two changes — the Gulf of Mexico and Denali — haven’t been published by the GNIS yet, so Google Maps is still showing the “old” names there.

I get the frustration with the arbitrary decisions of an erratic president, but this seems like a… non-issue? If the government changes the names of bodies of water, as the US government plans to do (the executive order was published by Trump on January 20^th and is pending a GNIS update), Google is right to reflect that in Maps.