Google announced earlier this week that it will comply with the Trump administration’s decision to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America.” Now Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum has some ideas of her own for some new naming conventions, as long as Google is taking requests. According to a report from the BBC, Sheinbaum wrote a letter to Google asking the company to either keep the Gulf’s name or at least hear her out on some of her own name changes.
In her letter to Google, which she presented during her morning press conference Thursday, Sheinbaum argued that the Trump administration has no legal right to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico. According to her, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea only extends a nation’s sovereign territory up to 12 nautical miles off its coastline. So that 12 miles can be the “Gulf of America,” she said, but nothing else.
Sheinbaum made the case that Google should not bend to “the mandate of a country” attempting to change the name of an international sea. “For us it is still the Gulf of Mexico, and for the entire world it is still the Gulf of Mexico,” she said.
She’s right about that. Even with Google agreeing to swap the name as soon as it appears in the Geographic Names Information System, which maintains the national standard for geographic nomenclature, exclusively labeling the body of water as the Gulf of America will be reserved for Americans using Google Maps. Mexico will continue to see it appear with the Gulf of Mexico label, and the rest of the world will still see both names displayed side by side, per a report from the New York Times.
Mexico’s president also decided to pitch a couple of her own name changes to Google, since the company seems so accommodating of that kind of thing at the moment. “We are also going to ask for Mexican America to appear on the map,” she said, referencing the fact that a map from 1607 gave that name, appearing as “America Mexicana,” to the land we now know as the United States. (That same map called the body of water the Gulf of Mexico, by the way.)
It’s unlikely Google will go along with that, but the company’s choice to acquiesce to Trump’s executive order is another sign of Big Tech playing along with the new administration and a continuation of Google’s long-held policy of fence-sitting. The company regularly serves different names depending on the region of a user, going so far as to change the appearance of borders based on who is looking at the map. So who needs to agree to borders or naming conventions? We can all just live in a world of our own choosing, reinforced by technology that bends to the will of power.
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