The president of Mexico on Thursday expressed hope that Google “reconsiders” its decision to change its online maps to reflect U.S. President Donald Trump’s claim that he has the authority to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico.
Shortly after taking office, Trump issued an executive order announcing he was changing the name of the body of water to the Gulf of America.
For U.S. users of Google Maps, the gulf was listed as the Gulf of America as of Thursday. Google, whose CEO attended Trump’s inauguration along with other tech moguls, said last month it has “a long-standing practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources.”
But Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum warned Thursday that her government “will file a civil suit” against Google if it does not revert back to labeling the international body of water the Gulf of Mexico.
Come on, guys. You have drug cartels. Surely they have a guy named Luigi. Doesn’t Trump want to declare war on Mexico or some insane shit like that?
You have drug cartels.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_drug_trafficking_allegations
Everyone has drug cartels. The US doesn’t even make thr top 20 tho.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/20-countries-highest-number-drug-220037331.html
That link isn’t resolving.
What do you mean by not resolving? It isn’t working for you?
That’s what that means, yes. Worked for me though.
I want to know how many of the people here defending Google’s decision would be okay with Google labeling Taiwan as “Taiwan (Chinese Taipei)” for people in Taiwan and also the rest of the world.
Google are an American company, and the government of the USA has changed the name. What else do people expect them to do?
Besides, it still say Gulf of Mexico if you’re outside the USA.
It shows up as “Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)” outside of the US apparently. That seems like enough to make a fuss to me; bodies of international water have specific rules around name changes and the US can’t unilaterally decide differently.
This is accurate. Here’s a screenshot from my friend in France.
I’m a mexican in mexico, my phone’s in japanese and it still shows as gulf of mexico
Ha. I speak Spanish and Japanese. My girlfriend lives in Jilatopec. Sheinbaum está furiosa con Trump y me encanta.
Ok, that’s absurd. I thought it makes sense to change the name for people in the US if that’s the official name in the US (according to the USGS data, which has always been the official source for this info). But translating the US name into other languages that already have a name for it makes no sense.
Google is evil.
They did change that line from “do no evil” to “do any profitable amount of evil”, so this is fair play.
americans can call it whatever the fuck they want, that wont suddenly change its local or english name in any other countries
Imagine being a tourist in the US, looking for an address you believe to be say, Martin Luther King Street. Can’t find it anywhere, even on Google maps, then eventually you talk to someone and find out it’s now called Elon Musk Avenue.
Not saying this is exactly the same, but if we’re letting people change the names of places on commonly used global map software willy nilly, even if it’s just region to region, we’re gonna end up with problems. It’s not like “freedom fries” back in the day that legitimately affected no one.
And I am suddenly seeing a parenthetical on the Gulf here outside the US, so there technically was a sudden change
The issue is the US does not own the gulf whereas they own the streets.
True. Guess it’s more like them getting Google to change Greenland into West Alaska
East? It’s east of Alaska…
I’d like to say I did that on purpose to show how dumb they’d be renaming it, but it is I who can’t remember my East and West
What are the rules? And who makes them?
What else do people expect them to do?
1.- Refuse-
2.- Apply only the part of the name change that’s actually covered by US jurisdiction. The Gulf of Mexico extends noticeably beyond US’s borders.
But hey this is Google we’re talking about.
Besides, it still say Gulf of Mexico if you’re outside the USA.
If I’m a eg.: Colombian, it should be
“Gulf of Mexico”“Golfo de México” wherever I stand, not “Gulf of America”.OK, but how is Google supposed to know what nationality you are?
Doesn’t need to (but yeah yeah they’re Google, I know…). They just should name it “Gulf of México” or whatever the translated name is to the user’s device, and add an asterisk somewhere that shows a note to the effect of “a small fraction of Confederate remnants think it should be called ‘Gulf of America’”.
That is essentially what they’ve done by putting Gulf of America in brackets behind the original name.
But why? Why should any other country care about the US’s ridiculous internal politics
IP address, same way they decide what language to show the names in
Apply only the part of the name change that’s actually covered by US jurisdiction.
Strictly speaking, per the EO, this is what they should have done. The EO defines the area to be renamed as:
the U.S. Continental Shelf area bounded on the northeast, north, and northwest by the States of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida and extending to the seaward boundary with Mexico and Cuba in the area formerly named as the Gulf of Mexico
You can see exactly where that seaward boundary is on this map: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_ECS_Regions_2023.png
The area described is less than half the whole Gulf of Mexico.
If there existed any valid reasoning for the change… 🤷♂️
But the Felon Dicktater is only doing it so he can claim himself architect of global geographic change. Same reason he wants Greenland, Panama, Gaza, etc.
Fuck that.
I back Sheinbaum on this one. Won’t matter, but do it anyway.
I’m thinking that there was a reason for the change; drilling for oil was blocked in the Gulf of Mexico.
There are 3200 active wells in the Gulf of Mexico.
I’m aware. I’ve been there. Kinda hard to miss em.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/06/business/biden-offshore-drilling-ban-trump/index.html
Dicktater brought to mind very unpleasant images
That’s a valid point, but why do you expect Google to take a principled stand on this? Take it up with your government.
In the world I want to live in…
Google would have taken a principled stand against such an attempt at a govt.
Instead, they bent the knee along with every other Tech Oligarch and, therefore, deserve the hit.
He wants to seize Greenland, Panama and Canada because they are either strategically important or have valuable resources, or both (and, in the case of Canada, because he wants revenge on Trudeau for being “woke” and standing up to his ape-dominance handshakes). This name change though is just because he hates Mexicans.
the government of the USA has changed the name
When did they do that?
Or are you one of those people who would agree if Trump said “I am the state”?
It was changed by executive order, which the president has the authority to do. Google doesn’t get to go “nuh-uh” and keep it the same.
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Because Google is a US company, and not in a position to tell the US government to take a walk, that’s why.
I mean, they are to an extent. The laws of the US are ostensibly supposed to allow citizens to call things whatever they want. If the government wants to throw a hissy fit and say the constitution is meaningless after all, let them do it. At least then we could give up all of the pretense that they are supposed to care about what it says.
to allow citizens to call things whatever they want.
I very much doubt that privilege extends to a mapmaker
Why wouldn’t it? Google’s just a company, not an arm of the government. At best, maybe there is some sort of accreditation process to have their maps called “authentic” or “accurate” or whatnot, but I’ve never heard of any US law that penalizes the publication of an inaccurate map.
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Tianamen square shows up just fine on Google maps, who is supposedly censoring them?
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I was unaware that the executive branch encompassed the entirety of the government. Please, do elaborate.
If you want to know more about how the US government works, I’m not the person to educate you.
Then why are you here trying to tell people that one asshole with an opinion is the government?
You can argue with strangers on the Internet as much as you like, but the fact is, the US president can and has changed the name of multiple geographic features, and arguing with me won’t change that.
Oh, you’ve been caught being dumb and your story is changing.
First it was “the government”, now it’s “the president”.
That’s not how America works, lol. Naming things is a legislative responsibility. Trump can sign as many executive orders as he wants, but it isn’t official without an act of congress and a chance for the judiciary to object.
Clearly, since you think an executive order is a law.
Executive orders are not laws. You do know that, right?
Just call it the Gulf of Fuck The Environment, We’re Getting Rich!
Sponsored by BP
…Brought to you by Carl’s Jr.
if im not mistaken, i think i heard google pulls the data from some external database, which changed the name. google didnt change shit, rather the database they use did.
i could be wrong, but i could have sworn i read that somewhere.
also seems rather petty to me to sue an american company for following US policy changes.
to be clear, i think the gulf of america thing is stupid as hell, and petty on trump’s part.
US policy doesn’t get to dictate how websites operate in non US jurisdiction. The US acting like it gets to bully the rest world into doing whatever it wants is the whole issue at hand. That’s the point: the trump admin wants to use US influence to intimidate, bully, and antagonize other countries by disrespecting their sovereignty.
US policy doesn’t get to dictate how websites operate in non US jurisdiction
It shows gulf of Mexico outside of the US
yes, i agree. but look at the link i posted. they still show it as gulf of mexico if you’re in mexico accessing maps.
my point is more that the US has changed the name of the gulf in america. it is very stupid and meaningless, but it is still officially renamed.
if i look at japan in google maps it says japan, not nipon. why? because that’s what we call it here. i personally think thats dumb too. we should call countries things by their real names. deutschland, bharat, suomi, etc
nevertheless the gulf is called the gulf of america here, no matter how dumb that is.
i seriously doubt google, who is under active investigation for monopoly and being threatened to be broken up, AND, recently lifted its ban on using its ai in weapons, is interested in keeping the old name of the gulf in protest against trump.
again, i think this entire situation is stupid, and would prefer everyone call it the gulf of mexico, but i also don’t think google specifically is doing anything wrong in this specific instance. google is doing plenty else wrong that matters much more.
found an article for whoever downvoted me lol.
Gulf of America name change in the U.S. — what you’ll see in Maps
Save your old maps for when this shit has to be reversed in 4 years unless the voters elect another republican troglodyte.
Hey! What did I ever do to you?
He was into a girl, but you beat her over the head with a club and dragged her back to your cave by her hair before he could make the first move (and beat her over he head with a club and drag her back to his cave by her hair).
You trog-blocked him, dude.
Oops. My bad
I hope they’re so screwed over and see no real progress come next election because many are being affected, that’s for sure. They’ll reap the shittier half of what they sowed.
Thing is, the next MAGA/QAnon nutter will just tell people that it’s the lib’s fault and they will eat it up and vote for the next unhinged, cleptocratic sociopath. Or maybe by then the US will have gone full Russia and just openly manipulate the elections
I used to be a “let’s find some mutual understanding” guy but now that they’ve dumped this disaster on the nation I have no sympathy for them. Lost your healthcare? Cuts in services? Sucks to be you…
Apparently a lot of them are losing their farms. Which tells me that the US had too many farms.
Can someone just make a mod or something for g-maps to name all American names to like Spanish ones? Nuevo York, Guashintón Distrito de Columbia, that kinda stuff.
Guayinton or Guallinton fits better
Just access GMaps through your VPN through Mexico, and your wildest dreams can come true.
or we keep american shit inside america. fuck googlemaps, apple and all other shitty US corporations. see, tump will die some day and be forgotten, but people will remember what apple and google did. next time you see someone work for alphabet…spit them in the face. next time an american buys a burger, you spit on it. etc. it is not about actual harm as america is killing itself anyway atm. my bingo card says if trump wins twice, there shall also be two pandemics. maybe protest the egg prices a bit more before using that muri-brain to do sth. against it. americans are just stupid.
Well, the continent was named America, not the US continent. So the name Gulf of America just sounds right.
I prefer the name “golfo del gringo loco”
Everyone needs to get used to ignoring this bullshit. The Gulf of America thing isn’t important. It doesn’t effect anyone, and there’s far too many posts about it when there are real things to pay attention to. This is purely a distraction. Stop giving it attention.
Reality has to BE.
Out with the oldspeak. In with the newspeak.
It’s the details that make up the whole picture.
As an isolated situation, the renaming thing may be stupid and not worth giving any credence. Energy can be spent resisting elsewhere in more useful places. However along with the rest of the actions of billionare corpos that kissed the ring, it’s part of the overall trend with devastating consequences. Bullshit details shouldn’t be ignored, but acknowledged as “they’re fucking us from all directions right now and waging war on reality, and we really should stop letting them”.
It’s definitely a distraction tactic, but at the very least looking at Google Maps and Bing Maps makes very clear to people which megacorps are riding the oligarchy; just in case anyone held hope their favorite “techbro revolutionary” might side with them. PS: Mapquest gets it right.
There is one part thats relevant, and thats the government suing AsPo for refusing to comply. Thats a direct attack on the First Amendment
Nah it actually matters more than you think. As an American you might think this is okay, but its not. And Trump getting away with whatever he wants all the time is because of enabling
For sure. It’s just that this isn’t the part that matter. This is part of the enabling. If you’re paying attention here you don’t see the other thing over there. It’s slight of hand. You only have so much attention, and it’s better spent where it actually has an effect. This will be reversed with the next president.
Meh I’ll still use Google.
I don’t. DuckDuckGo and an alternative email provider are wonderful.
DuckDuckGo is just Bing. And Microsoft is not any better in terms of kissing Trump’s ass.
Not quite.
DuckDuckGo’s results are a compilation of “over 400” sources according to itself, including Bing, Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha , Yandex, and its own web crawler (the DuckDuckBot); but none from Google. It also uses data from sites such as wikipedia, to populate knowledge panel boxes to the right of the search results.
Its main partnership is with Bing.
And this is why it’s a problem: https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/17/brave_duckduckgo/
Still they’re right - it’s not “just Bing” that’s a bit of an over simplification IMO, like someone saying “firefox is just google chrome” because it uses google search by default.
DDG is still preferable to vanilla bing and google because the privacy is stronger and it produces useful results. There is no perfect search engine, right now we have to compromise.
I can understand why. To each their own.
Whenever I see Gulf of America mentioned, in my head it sounds like “This is America” in the Childish Gambino song.
Gulf of America, don’t catch you shippin now, look where I’m fishin now, potus be trippin yo (woo), gulf of america
😄
What I see is “Gulf of Swastika”.
I can see Google (and Apple) quietly paying a fine and changing it for Mexico (and any other jurisdiction that specifically asks).
This is stupid and cowardly of them, but that aside, the implication is 100% “comply, or the US government will make life difficult for Google.” I can see how they’re stuck between a rock and a hard place.
It already does
This is stupid and cowardly of them,
What else did you expect?
Step two of the plan you outlined was inverted by Google, but the effect is the same: IIRC it only shows up that way for US users.
Edit: apparently that was either a lie or incomplete info, see comments elsewhere in this thread.
IIRC it only shows up that way for US users.
apparently that was either a lie or incomplete info
Where’d you first hear this?
Not judging, just curious about the information chain.
I can confirm that it shows up as both for me. I’m not in US or Mexico, and it shows as “Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)”. The info I saw was that it shows as GoA in the US, GoM in Mexico, and both everywhere else. At least 2 of those are true, I’m guessing all 3 are
Can confirm it’s both here in Canada where we’re not supposed to be a part of this insanity
Reporting about how the maps team reclassified the US as a “sensitive country”, a la: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/28/google-reclassifies-us-as-sensitive-country-like-china-russia-.html
The new name shows only for USA. In Mexico it’s unchanged, or shown with both names.
Our president is dumb and just wants to look like she’s fighting back without actually doing anything significant.
Showing with both names does not make it any better and I’m not sure why you think it does. They’re just kowtowing to a unilateral decision made by one of the multiple countries that border the Gulf of Mexico.
I assume you would not want Taiwan to be called Chinese Taipei on Google Maps despite China calling it that.
It’s showing up worldwide. Its why Mexico is threatening to sue.
Since when is the big tech the arbiter of truth? It might come as a surprise to you, but Google and Apple don’t care about your holy war against Trump.
You think Google and Apple should call it the Gulf of America?
I think Google and Apple should call it whatever the official names are, not to take any sort of political stance.
Then why add “Gulf of America” in countries that do not recognize the name?
In case you have forgotten, Google is an American company, every one of their decisions is taken in California. Maybe calling everything you don’t agree “fascist” isn’t a smart idea, since it shows that you have no idea what the meaning of that word is.
That is not what I asked.
OK, let’s reverse it, and say Mexico renamed the Gulf to something else. What do you think Google should do, inside Mexico and out?
Inside Mexico they should name it whatever the Mexico calls it. Outside Mexico it should be called however it is called in the respective country.
But again, Google is based in the US, all their decisions are made there.
Nah, they’re willing collaborators.
I legitimately don’t understand why the U.S. isn’t the only locality where it shows up as “Gulf of America”.
Set the en-US string to “Gulf of America”. Leave literally every other region’s text string untouched from what it was 6 months ago.
When the next Democrat U.S. President gets sworn in and immediately Executive Orders it back to “Gulf of Mexico”, change the en-US string back to that.
This is all so stupid and melodramatic.
This is all so stupid and melodramatic.
That’s the point!
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It’s Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America) outside of the USA and just Gulf of Mexico in Mexico. Absolute insanity
