Google is an American company. America's President asked the name be changed. Kinda stupid to accuse them of anything untoward.
The duty to disobey illegal orders is connected to the Holocaust but existed long before and applies to many other situations.
Just because a situation is not exactly the Holocaust DOES NOT mean that it's fine for people to abdicate personal responsibility by saying they're just following orders.
You do understand that right?
There exists no mechanism in the US for the president to force a private company to change the name of anything.
They did this to curry favor with the regime. It is naked sycophancy that shows exactly where the leadership of this company stands.
Idk what timeline you're looking at, but if they knew it was changing anyway, might as well.
Also, the President in many ways has a lot of control over all three branches of government. Do they really want to risk contracts because USGS hasn't technically been updated yet?
But the USGS database (GNIS) did not update when Google (and Apple) changed the name. Google's claim that they pulled from GNIS was untrue
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/google-maps-renames-...
So again, it looks like they changed it to align to an upcoming change to official sources. They probably should not have claimed it was wholly dependent on USGS.
I'm sure that's not how it would go.