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.
Don’t sue- just threaten to block some of googles services in your country and they’ll come around real quick. Hit em where it hurts. Google isn’t hurting for lawyers.
You have to hit them in the wallet. Every time Trump does or says anything about tariffs, just starting increasing tariffs on all Tesla products.
We can’t hit Trump directly but we can hit his little friends quite easily.
Musk will have an absolute meltdown on twitter of course, but if you just ignore him he’ll give up. He’s already shown that he is prepared to back down if he’s actually facing financial penalties.
Tragically we have a dried apricot ceding power to the highest bidder. There isn’t much for other countries to do directly unless they are paying for “sock puppet time” or getting in a pissing match with a clown that makes a juggalo look smart.
This is more about controlling (collateral) damage: in this case megacorps “kissing the ring” via stupid shit like Google is doing presently. Countries can fuck with corporations far easier than we can (guess who paid for sock puppet time…)
Google is clearly attempting to make themselves more “saleable” to the ruling party by dropping things like month names or renaming universally accepted names of global features. Right now their -baseline- is where we are at currently. A lawsuit does next to nothing. It’s an operating cost. A country threatening to blacklist their service will hit them cleanly in the only thing that matters: their shareholders. Our biggest corporations have time and again rolled over for this tactic. They may have elevated themselves to a godlike status within the states but they are vulnerable outside our shores.
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”. A name dictated by an authoritarian Nazi without proper procedure, that symbolizes the Trump administration.
Your issue is with the fed gov, or what is left of it
Uninstalled 👍
Ive been already boycotting google, amazon, facebook, reddit. Yall need to get on it
it really sucks when you realise that virtually everything is a US company… and yet everything they sell is made in fucking China
My phone is a Pixel on Google Fi, and I have a YouTube premium account. I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me :( lol
Nah. I’ll start boycotting google when there are useful alternatives. Amazon, facebook, reddit - no problem.
Google search - fine, I can get by with DDG or Yandex. Gmail - sure, whatever. Maps? Organic Maps (and other openstreetmaps front-ends) works alright for getting your bearings, but it’s a far cry from useful for finding businesses, and terrible for navigation. Waze used to be the only viable alternative, but ever since Google bought them, it’s hard to justify a full boycott without massively inconveniencing myself.
Same for meta as a whole. Facebook and Instagram, sure, no need. But living without whatsapp is simply impossible in some countries, where it’s the de-facto standard for communication, and even used as the only means of contact with government agencies.
We did it with Lemmy. It CAN be done!
Yeah its true unfortunately
Fr, I try, but it’s really not possible to get away from these companies.
Nobody wants signal, nobody wants mastodon, nobody wants or frankly can use openstreetmaps. Alternatives are just not good enough
Alternatives are just not good enough
And to no fault of their own of course. They just aren’t working with the same resources as Google and the others.
I think it’s more a question of stepping down our level of comfort at this point. Can we live without a particular service that Google provides, when there are no alternatives with feature parity? Or can we live with the fact that some of the features aren’t working as well or missing, and use the alternatives anyway?
Yeah, I still find it impressive how good mastodon and lemmy are given the limitations.
For sure, and that is possible for personal things, but for social things it’s almost impossible to live without some features.
People don’t want to step down their level of comfort when it comes to WhatsApp (where I live people don’t use SMS because they’re limited), so you’re forced to either keep your contacts (which includes family) or move to signal/threema/session/matrix/etc. But have no one to talk to
If you disapprove of internet companies caving to authoritarian politics, I have bad news for you about Yandex
Senkaku Islands are the center of a dispute between Japan and China, both claim them, both have names for them. Wikipedia goes more in depth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senkaku_Islands
On google maps we get…
So it’s not like they can’t give stuff multiple names.
That’s what YOU get since you’re neither in China nor Japan. They only get to see their relative government’s name. China in fact gets to see nothing since they block Google, but it you happen to be in Hong Kong or Macau, you would.
President of mexico is just showing themselves to be as big of a baby as trump. Best thing to do is ignore it. Its of such little importance.
I stopped using everything Google. Fascist collaborators won’t get a dime of my money, won’t get my eyeballs on any of their ads, and won’t get a single kilobyte of data from me to sell for profit.
I’ll keep my gmail account open because all it really does is accumulate spam which probably costs them money.
So you stopped using an iPhone too? Because Apple also renamed the gulf in their maps app.
Is Symbian still good these days?
I also don’t buy Crapple products either, but that’s a personal choice.
If anyone is still buying Apple products after the whole slowing phones down the thing and the soldered ram thing and that you can’t fix your own phone thing and the oh you can fix your phone if you use our equipment except our equipment is really expensive and actually you can’t get it thing, then there’s something wrong with you.
Haha, seeing you being downvoted for pointing a fact, tell me everything about the people frequenting this sub.
Obviously apple can’t be fascist, because Tim Apple is gay!
Except no one said that you idiot.
removed by mod
Fascism exists
Again, this is one of the dumbest fucking wastes of money I’ve ever seen. Waste of labor from the top down. Waste of resources. This is purely a pride move. It’s the gulf of Mexico and always has been. There are American songs about the gulf of Mexico. It’s history. I have said it before and I’ll say it again, I fucking hate this timeline. This shit is wild. This stuff now days is a mockery of our world.
Look we’re wasting our hard earned tax payer money on crazy fraudulent things like science, education, weather, feeding children, helping the poor, medicine… Dumb things like that. And you’re gonna tell me that changing the name of a body of water to include the greatest God damn country in America is a waste? Next thing you know you’re gonna stand there and tell me that poor people should be able to afford a hospital visit.
Republicans are full of it anyway.
Study after study has shown that a nationalized healthcare system increases a nation’s GDP in the long run. After all, people who are unable to work due to sickness or death that were caused by preventable condition, don’t pay taxes.
For everyone else, not having to pay for private health care gives them more disposable income. Which means they spend it on other things which makes businesses more profitable.
Maybe this is the thing that finally unites the cartels.
removed by mod
Do it honey. Make em pay for suckin orange ass
Yeah!! Spend your money on a completely pointless lawsuit!! Fill some lawyers pockets instead of helping your citizens!!
Remember: the most important thing to professional politicians is optics! It’s what fools the morons into thinking you are doing something good!
While we are at renaming things…
It’s stupid, but it’s not that extreme. Countries have different names for things. For example, Germany calls the Baltic Sea “Ostsee” (lit. east sea) and Lake Constance 'Bodensee" (lit. bottom sea) but those things are only at the bottom and east for Germany.
China calls Taiwan “Chinese Taipei.” Should Google Maps show “Taiwan (Chinese Taipei)” on maps? Because I don’t see how that would be China’s call any more than the name of the Gulf would be Trump’s call.
Is there Google maps in China? If there is, I’d be surprised if it didn’t say that. That is claiming ownership. Countries can’t own a gulf beyond the domestic waters convention. But, I don’t know, that’s a good question because a regular Chinese person would just be confused. It wouldn’t effect any policy change
I did not say in China. Google Maps says “Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)” in most of the world. It sure is here in Britain.
Also, calling the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America is a clear claim of ownership.
Mexico didn’t own it before any more than the US owns it now. I don’t like the nationalistic intentions, but I can rationalize it to myself that Mexico is also part of [North] America
No shit they didn’t. And they never have. Because it was called the Gulf of Mexico before Mexico as a nation existed. It was called that because it was named after the Valley of Mexico, which was part of New Spain at the time the Gulf was named. Mexico as a country didn’t exist until centuries later.
Maybe actually read the history of this before deciding this is about anyone other than Trump claiming ownership of that gulf.
No one can own the Gulf anyway. Trump just wanted to stir shit up and people like you getting all bent out of shape are just playing into it. It’s just a name
“Mount McKinley” is “just a name” for what is supposed to be called Denali. Ask an indigenous person if they think changing the name of a sacred mountain to the name of a man responsible for one of them many genocides of their people is “just a name.”
Then ask virtually any black person if they don’t care about Trump and Republicans restoring Confederate generals’ names to military bases. Find out if they think it’s “just a name.”
Names have power and I’m amazed you don’t realize that.
There’s a slight difference in that “Ostsee” is the common name. If the German chancellor decides to call it “Deutsche See” tomorrow, the name would continue to be “Ostsee”, because that’s how language usually works.
“Gulf of America” is just a dictator’s wish of a common name. The people of OpenStreetMap decided to use the tag “official_name:en_US” for that reason, while keeping “Gulf of Mexico” for the commonly used “name:en-US”.
I’m positive that exact thing happened. I’m sure those were not the common names throughout history. At some point, people named things from their perspective iegardless of what others, including those living adjacent to the thing called it. I’ll give you the nationalistic part; that’s the stupid part, but it’s not uncommon to have a name from a different perspective
deleted by creator
