Or just refuse to commit. E.g. Google Maps, to this day, will not show the country for any Crimean city when you click on it to bring up its info panel. If you do this with e.g. Kherson, you get "Kherson, Kherson Oblast, Ukraine". But if you do it with Sevastopol, you only get the city name, not the region & country. It also shows dotted borders between Crimea and both Russia and Ukraine.
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.
What does "actually in control" mean? When the IRA set up a checkpoint in Rosslea, should that have moved the border on the map? When there are disputes over uninhabited islands, do you want it to show whoever visited first? Obviously these are small examples, but the same issues apply to full-scale civil wars.
You'd also be essentially legitimising the right of conquest if as soon as country A invades country B you move the border on the map. That would be pretty counterproductive.
> You'd also be essentially legitimising the right of conquest
Documenting reality doesn't endorse what happened. Istanbul was Constantinople. Shit happens. If I'm travelling, I'd much rather the flags and borders reflect the situation on the ground instead of making meaningless humanitarian gestures.
The issue is reality not being settled or agreed upon. For disputed territories there is effectively two realities both officially backed by sovereign countries.
You can come up with some arbitrary criteria to split the difference, but your reality would break when you effectively set foot in a spot that works under the competing assumption.
The issue is reality not being settled or agreed upon. For disputed territories there is effectively two realities both officially backed by sovereign countries.
No, in a disputed territory there's one reality, and 1..n delusions.
Well, maybe that's what the victor will write in the future history books, but since today's mapmakers don't know who's going to win that's not really a helpful perspective.
For each "disputed" territory there is only one party actually in control right now. If you bothered to actually travel to e.g. Taiwan you'd quickly find out that the PRC's opinions are irrelevant.
> For each "disputed" territory there is only one party actually in control right now. If you bothered to actually travel to e.g. Taiwan you'd quickly find out that the PRC's opinions are irrelevant.
If you bothered to actually travel to Ukraine you'd find there are plenty of places where you can get dronestruck by either side. If you bothered to actually travel to the disputed India/China/Pakistan border area you'll find either side might hit you with a stick and take you into custody. If you'd lived in Northern Ireland 40 years ago, or even South Italy today, you'd find that the group that enforces its laws with force in your street might be quite different from the group that is internationally thought to be "in control" of the country you're supposedly part of.
Control is not a binary. There's no country in the world that doesn't have murders, kidnappings, and takeovers. When (as in South Korea recently) there's a group of people outside a guy's house who say they're coming to arrest him under a warrant from the Supreme Court, and he says he's the President and the warrant is illegitimate and they're just a gang of thugs trying to kidnap him, who is in control? There's no way to answer that except retrospectively. When armed men declare independence or a revolution, are they "in control" of an area in a sense that should be shown on a map, or just regular criminals? Again, no way to tell.
I'm quite familiar with Taiwan thank you very much, and yes it's one of the more stable situations (although these things have a way of seeming stable until they suddenly aren't) where one of the claims is rather attenuated and silly. That doesn't mean there's a simple, easy solution to territory disputes in general.
The situation on the ground is that if you, say, visit Crimea by obtaining a Russian visa, you might not even be able to enter Ukraine afterwards. This feels like something that also needs to be reflected.
It's the opposite of meaningless. Delegitimising wars of conquest massively reduced them and was a big part of why the 20th century was so much more peaceful on the whole (yes, even with the giant wars that did take place) than those before it.
