Isn’t Google Maps blocked in Russia anyway? Crimea is a different story, as many countries recognize it to be in some kind of limbo and treat it as neither Russian nor Ukrainian.
I think Yandex (Russian Google) removed borders completely from their maps. Also because it’s impossible to figure out where the Russian government would like them to be. Might change on a daily basis.
Google maps added the „gulf of America“ to their US version, because anywhere else it’s still the Gulf of Mexico (even in iOS autocorrect, it changed it correctly to uppercase).
Google did this way back, sometime in 2016 IIRC, before they were blocked in Russia. I'm not really sure why they still keep going with this esp. since they still show the entirety of Donbas as Ukrainian, and it has been occupied for just as long as Crimea has been.
Yandex censorship around this is really amusing. They did indeed drop all mentions of countries and borders everywhere, for one thing. But also in Alice (their LLM chatbot), it's to the point where if you ask it to prepare a road trip from Sochi to Bucharest and describe the route in detail including which countries it passes through, it refuses to answer.
the "gulf of america" thing is Google pandering to Trump, they originally had a policy of only using the popular name in a given locale.
> 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.
that's different, they had location-dependent names at the time of this article too, the issue is specifically about the fact that even if you have location-dependent names you'd use the name that is commonly used in that location, not an arbitrary regulation name.
I thought they used the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) from the USGS. If this buffoonery does pass, it will reflect in the government official data source - and thus on Google maps?
And nobody outside of the US cares about what's inside those official databases. If Trump changes the name of China to "Smelly Food Country" it might be required to change this in US Google Maps But if this propagates to Google Maps in other countries people will just laugh at them and might stop using it.
But they should see what their home country calls it? I am totally against this, but don't really think Google is bending the knee or hard-coding a name here.
I think Yandex (Russian Google) removed borders completely from their maps. Also because it’s impossible to figure out where the Russian government would like them to be. Might change on a daily basis.
Google maps added the „gulf of America“ to their US version, because anywhere else it’s still the Gulf of Mexico (even in iOS autocorrect, it changed it correctly to uppercase).