Following President Trump's declarations about changes to the map, Google employees were given the highest level of urgency to reclassify the U.S.

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.

  • AA5B@lemmy.world
    0·
    5 months ago

    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

    • renzev@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      5 months ago

      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.

      • Initiateofthevoid@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        0·
        5 months ago

        That’s very interesting. Do you know where I could learn more about that decision? I tried searching but its 2025 and any phrases I could think of just returned websites offering nearly identical collections of flag emojis…

        • renzev@lemmy.world
          1·
          5 months ago

          From Wikipedia:

          These were defined by October 2010 as part of the Unicode 6.0 support for emoji, as an alternative to encoding separate characters for each country flag. Although they can be displayed as Roman letters, it is intended that implementations may choose to display them in other ways, such as by using national flags. The Unicode FAQ indicates that this mechanism should be used and that symbols for national flags will not be directly encoded.

          I don’t think you’ll be able to find a source that specifically says “yeah, they did this to avoid having to make a decision about which countries are important/independent enough to have flags”, but like… why else would they go with this more complicated system over just defining separate codepoints for each flag?