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Comment by poulpy123 | Hacker News Reader

It's an american company, whatever they say come with an asterisk saying whatever they say it depends on what the powers in the USA decide (and it's the same for other countries with their own companies).

Anyway I don't think google should be the one choosing the names they call water bodies. They just need to use the official names for the IPs countries, and show lake america, gulf of america, ocean america, asian america, european america and african america if Trump makes it official, but only for the US IPs.

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The great state of Indiana once declared that pi was equal to exactly 3.2. [0]

Should they also break all of their code by adhering to that falsehood because it was politically expedient?

Nah. Truth is a real thing, and I want to live in a world were facts are not dictated to us by failed gameshow hosts who happened to turn political in their retirement years.

[0] https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~alopez-o/math-faq/mathtext/node18.h...

That pi bill never became law.

I would say their point still stands.

Whether the bill was passed is ultimately irrelevant.

Do you think Google should serve customers or politicians?

As a user I want the map names I know, not whatever BS some egomaniac politician announced yesterday.

That's why I wrote official. If the US as a country and as an institution change the name of a place, it is neither the problem nor the role of google to decide if it is good or not. I would not be happy if my president decided to rename the united kingdom to the îles normandes (normandy isles), but I do think that once official google should change the name

Well first the president has to have the actual legal power to “rename” a geographic area or a body of water. Which is not exactly the case. Same way he can’t redefine the meaning of words and such.

I don't know... I tend to agree with you (especially in this case), but I can also see cases where that's actually not what I'd expect. My hometown has a square that everyone knows as the "tribunal square" (which used to be its official name), but that's not been its official name in decades and about 30% of people don't even know the current official name, yet I would expect a map to refer to it by its current official name and not "tribunal square".

Maybe not quite the same as in this case, the entity who names the square actually owns the square, which isn't the case in the gulf of mexico naming situation. But there is some grey area I think.

>Do you think Google should serve customers or politicians?

Why not ask the question this way.

Do you think Google should serve people with money in their hand or a gun to their head?

What do you want to see when streets get renamed to Martin Luther King Jr Blvd? Or renamed away from Caesar Chavez? How long do you wait for the "common name" to take precedence?

Street names are fundamentally different. You wait until the new name actually becomes commonly used and not just a deranged joke.

> "show lake america, gulf of america, ocean america, asian america, european america and african america if Trump makes it official, but only for the US IP"

I would maybe even welcome that approach at this stage, just to demonstrate the absurdity of those decisions.

They could actively encourage also other countries to rename all foreign landmarks as they please, to fast-track a separate "international naming" convention so people can again communicate across borders...

Exactly, that's why en-us is different than en-gb, en-ca, or even en-jp.

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