Golfo del Gringo Loco

Monday, 17 February 2025

You saw the news last week, I’m sure, that both of the major mapping-app providers, Google and Apple, have updated their maps to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America”. Microsoft’s Bing Maps, which I would describe as a minor provider, has made the change too.¹ It’s all actually quite a bit more complicated than “they renamed the Gulf of Mexico”, but bear with me for now.

You’ve also seen, I’m equally sure, a lot of people angry at Google and Apple for going along with this. That anger is — to some degree — misplaced. I get where the anger comes from, but it’s still misplaced. My initial take, right in the midst of Trump’s inauguration speech on January 20, was that if he went through with it, Apple and Google and everyone else who publishes maps should just ignore it. Trump, obviously, did go through with it: the United States Geological Survey, an agency within the Department of the Interior, which is within the executive branch and thus under the president’s purview, officially made the change on February 7. Now that it’s official US government policy, “just ignore it” really isn’t feasible. If that’s still your stance, I implore you to consider at least a bit more nuance.

But let’s first stipulate up front that there are multiple far more important and urgent issues facing the United States and the world, just four short weeks into the Trump 2.0 administration. Off the top of my head: Ukraine, Gaza, tariffs, DOGE, the rule of law. Whether you approve or disapprove of Trump’s actions on any or all of those issues, there should be no question that all of them are important and consequential. The name we see on maps for a body of water, not as much. But it’s the smallness, the relative unimportance, the spiteful pettiness of the renaming in the first place — down to the fact that until Trump’s executive action, there was no controversy, zero, none, nada, anywhere in the world, amongst any group of people, regarding the name of the Gulf of Mexico — that makes it interesting to examine in detail how Google and Apple have chosen to deal with it. It’s only because this particular issue is so spectacularly piddling that we can consider it in full.

The motivation behind the name change is simple as well. Trump didn’t change the US’s officially recognized name of, say, the Atlantic Ocean or the continent of Africa. He just as easily could, but he won’t. And it’s not like “Gulf of Mexico” was on a list of “debatable or controversial names” until he created this controversy out of thin air. It’s just the one name on the globe that a president of the United States can change to stick it to Mexico, a country Donald Trump has objectively racist feelings toward. Trump never campaigned on building a wall at our northern border with Canada, nor has he (yet?) attempted to rename Lake Ontario. It’s about Mexico, and asserting power by fiat. Trump has a lifelong history of putting his name on buildings he doesn’t own. He’d rather have his name emblazoned on a building he doesn’t own than own a building that doesn’t bear his name. To Trump, the name on the sign is more important than the deed. So too, now, with the name on a map. The Gulf of Mexico is an international body of water that belongs to no nation, but declaring this new name implies that it heretofore belonged to Mexico, and now belongs to us, which is to say belongs to him, our unquestioned dear leader. That Trump took it from Mexico, without firing a shot — when in fact all he did was order a string to be changed in a government database. Shakespeare would have us believe that a sea by any other name would taste as salty. Trump doesn’t read Shakespeare.

How Google and Apple Are Labelling the Gulf, Globally

The first important thing to know is that Google Maps and Apple Maps are not singular global atlases. They both show different names (and in rare cases, different geographies) in different regions around the world. They each are more like a collection of regional atlases. In constrast, there’s only one Oxford English Dictionary. If the OED changes a word’s definition, or adds a new word, those changes appear to everyone in the world. My OED is your OED, no matter where you and I live or currently find ourselves on the globe. Google and Apple Maps aren’t like that. It’s better to think of them as services that provide region-by-region maps.

Google, to their credit, has a blog post describing and illustrating exactly what users around the world now see in Google Maps:

In the U.S., the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) has officially updated “Gulf of Mexico” to “Gulf of America.” As we announced two weeks ago and consistent with our longstanding practices, we’ve begun rolling out changes to reflect this update. People using Maps in the U.S. will see “Gulf of America,” and people in Mexico will see “Gulf of Mexico.” Everyone else will see both names.

As their illustration shows, “both names” means putting “Gulf of America” in parentheses for users who are anywhere else in the world other than the U.S. or Mexico: “Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)”.

Apple’s approach has been more Apple-like, which is to say without comment. They made no public comment before changing the name in Apple Maps, and they have made no public comment since. (I’ve asked Apple PR for comment, but gotten none.) I’d appreciate a statement, like Google’s, stating what users around the world should expect to see. But I also understand their desire to say as little as possible. In a sense, the labels on Apple Maps speak for themselves, and are the only thing that actually matters. I also appreciate, that by never declaring a policy on the matter, Apple can change its map labels without rescinding or amending a policy.

So without a statement from Apple describing how the Gulf is labelled around the world, I did what I could: I asked my followers on Mastodon who are outside the US what they saw as the Gulf’s name, and to include screenshots if possible. That was on Friday, 14 February, after Apple Maps began showing “Gulf of America” in place of “Gulf of Mexico” to users here in the US. The response was overwhelming, with replies from people in over two dozen countries from around the world.² And at the time, their replies suggested that Apple was taking a subtly but intriguingly different approach from Google. To wit, while everyone in the US saw “Gulf of America” (with no mention of the established name), everyone everywhere else in the world still saw “Gulf of Mexico” (or their language’s translation of that name), with no mention, in parentheses or otherwise, of the new name now recognized by the United States.

I hoped that that was Apple’s plan, which would have been quietly subversive in isolating the United States as the only country in the world to even see the name “Gulf of America”. But I feared that Apple was simply slower than Google, that changes had been applied for users in the US first, but changes for the rest of the world simply hadn’t propagated. My fears were warranted.

Late in the evening (US Eastern Time) on Saturday, 15 February, new responses to my entreaty on Mastodon began showing labels in Apple Maps that matched Google’s:

• In the US: “Gulf of America”.
• In Mexico: “Gulf of Mexico”.
• Everywhere else: “Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)”.

I believe that the determining factor for what label you see, at least for Apple Maps, is unrelated to your physical location as determined by GPS or your IP address, but simply the region setting of your OS. On both MacOS and iOS, that’s in Settings → General → Language & Region → Region. This makes sense — you can use Apple Maps (and Google Maps) with Location Services turned off. You can play with this setting on your device to see what users around the world see in Maps without leaving your home, and without changing your device’s language. Thus, if you’re an American with your device set to the “United States” region, if you travel outside the US without changing your device settings, you’ll still see the US-specific new name for the gulf: “Gulf of America”, with its historic and world-recognized name — dare I say, its unambiguously correct name — not even referenced in parentheses.

The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment

This whole thing, needless to say, sucks. It’s profoundly stupid, and the aspects that aren’t stupid are jingoistic. But the notion that Google or Apple might reasonably just ignore this and tell Trump (and the entire Republican Party, and their supporters) to go pound sand is facile. I’m not saying they couldn’t do it. Of course they could. That’s like saying Trump can’t just declare a new name for an international body of water with a heretofore uncontroversial 400-year-old name.

But it wouldn’t be reasonable. It is reasonable for Google and Apple Maps to defer to, or at least acknowledge, the officially recognized names for each region in which they’re available. It’s not Google’s or Apple’s place to determine and adjudicate the official names on a map; their job is to recognize and display those names. In theory Google and/or Apple could position themselves as a global authoritative reference for geographic names. To be to maps something akin to the OED or Merriam-Webster to the English language. But if they were to pursue that route they’d put themselves in the position of adjudicating any and all controversies and disputes over names and borders. Civic government is where we should want such disputes arbitrated, if not resolved. Not by private companies. If Apple Maps is to be available in China, Apple Maps needs to present names and borders (and even the size of land masses — more on this below) that are amenable to the Chinese government. China sticks out because their demands are in stark contrast to the names and borders recognized by the rest of the world. Chinese maps are governed by CCP-mandated dogma. Most maps are governed by geographic and geopolitical reality. Taiwan, for example, is in fact an independent nation. Chinese maps (including those served by Apple to mainland Chinese users) label Taiwan as a province of China.

Now the United States is governed by another such dogma-driven regime.

In theory, maps ought not be political. In practice, they are and always have been. In theory, reasonable decisions and objectively correct decisions are one and the same when it comes to cartography. In practice, politics intercedes and they conflict. You can argue (and many people are) that Google and Apple should stick with the 400-year-old, recognized-the-world-over, and heretofore uncontroversial name “Gulf of Mexico”, and apply it globally. To simply ignore the new officially-recognized name of the gulf by the United States government. They could do that. No one would go to prison if they did. There would be no fines. But there would be a price to pay. Ignoring the new “Gulf of America” name recognized by the US government would, without question, court controversy. Republicans started to complain that Apple Maps hadn’t adopted the new name three weeks ago, before the change was even made official in the government’s GNIS reference database.

To ignore political reality is to court political controversy. It is not in the interests of large multinational corporations to court controversy. But it’s not possible to avoid controversy. What is reasonable is to minimize controversy. There’s a famous quote from Michael Jordan, when he declined to publicly endorse the Democratic challenger to the unabashedly racist Republican Jesse Helms in the 1990 North Carolina Senate race: “Republicans buy sneakers, too.”

Some might say “That’s the problem with capitalism.” I’d argue that it’s one of the benefits of capitalism. Unless you think extreme polarization is in the service of society, you want to see major institutions that are apolitical. For-profit corporations naturally serve that role. Yes, there’s a profit motive. Republicans don’t just buy sneakers, they buy phones and conduct web searches too. But who wants to see a world where everything is polarized politically, where every retailer, every device maker, every online service provider, every restaurant, every single thing you do, buy, or visit, is viewed through a polarized political prism? That way lies madness.

Most Americans, and most people in the western world, are beyond exhausted by our current levels of societal polarization. Escalating tensions further is not just contrary to the bottom-line interests of Apple and Google, it’s in none of our interests. People just want good accurate maps. They don’t want to choose — or worse, to be forced to choose — between right-leaning maps and left-leaning maps.

So if your argument is that neither Apple nor Google should be showing the name “Gulf of America” to anyone, anywhere, I’m with you that that’s the correct cartographical stance. But it would constitute political malpractice. Maps are important services to both companies, but the editorial integrity of their maps isn’t close to their primary business or purpose. Maps aren’t to Google or Apple what the English language is to the OED or Merriam-Webster. (Or what the news is to, say, the Associated Press. Hold that thought.)

So whether Google and Apple should show the new name at all shouldn’t be the question we’re asking. The right question is necessarily more nuanced: Who should see which names, where? And Google and Apple’s answers to that question are, alas, disappointing and worrisome. I’ll repeat the seemingly identical policy both companies are actually presenting today, by region:

• United States: “Gulf of America”.
• Mexico: “Gulf of Mexico”.
• Everywhere else in the world: “Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)”.

The best politically realistic option they could have chosen would be (I’ll use italics to emphasize that these are my own suggestions):

• United States: “Gulf of America (Gulf of Mexico)”.
• Everywhere else in the world: “Gulf of Mexico”.

There’s no good reason to even show “Gulf of America” in parentheses outside the US. We’re the ones with the stupid name change on the books, so we’re the ones who should get stuck seeing the stupid name. No one else should suffer the consequences of our political idiocy. But it is correct to show us, in America, the new dumb “Gulf of America” name. Again, if it were up to me, American users would see “Gulf of America (Gulf of Mexico)”, and everyone else would just see “Gulf of Mexico”. But that’s surely the best we in the reality-based community could hope for.

It’s absurd that users here in the US no longer see “Gulf of Mexico” at all. You can search for that term, and the “Gulf of America” will be the first result, but the 400-year-old name “Gulf of Mexico” no longer appears as a label on maps to US-region users for either Google Maps or Apple Maps. In any even vaguely reasonable political climate, even those in favor of the name change would endorse, perhaps even insist upon, a transitional period where the previous, familiar name appears in parentheses. Insisting that the name be changed in a snap, with no parenthetical reference to the previous name (a name that, again, has been recognized globally for over 400 years, and remains on every single printed map in existence, and every single work of literature and history referencing the Gulf) has some truly Orwellian memory hole vibes. We’ve always been at war with Eastasia. It’s always been the Gulf of America.

The US political right often makes use of the term “snowflake” to suggest that those on the left are delicate and fragile. But it sure seems snowflaky to object to “Gulf of America (Gulf of Mexico)” as a map label. Sticks and stones may break their bones but a historically accurate parenthetical map label will hurt them? Food for thought as you enjoy your freedom fries.

Consider the simple premise that a map ought to make sense to someone who doesn’t follow current events. That ought to be uncontroversial. But to someone who has tuned out of the news for the last two months this change must seem downright baffling. Even worse, it’s misleading. There’s no reason for most people even to suspect, let alone know, that both Google Maps and Apple Maps show region-specific names and labels. Americans, in general, tend to be parochial. Showing Americans the name “Gulf of America”, without “(Gulf of Mexico)” strongly implies that this is now the new world-recognized name, when in the fact the truth is quite the opposite: it’s a name recognized by one and only one country.³

Not showing the new name, at all, to Americans would be unreasonably provocative to the Trump administration and its supporters. But showing the new name to every region in the world but Mexico itself is needlessly obsequious to Trump and his supporters. And making Mexico an exception to global naming policy isn’t an honor or a favor to them — it’s an implied insult. It insinuates that there’s something wrong with them, too, legitimizing the notion that outside the US Trumpist right, there’s a legitimate debate about the Gulf’s name. The implied message is “Here you go, you delicate idiots, we’ll make you the second of only two nations in the world regarding the displayed name of this body of water — you, and the United States.” Mexico neither asked for nor provoked any of this. (Mexico only achieved independence from Spain in 1821; the “Gulf of Mexico” name is twice as old as Mexico as a nation, and at least 150 years older than the United States.)

There are numerous countries where Google Maps and Apple Maps show region-specific names and differing disputed borders (or lack thereof). From a 2020 report in The Washington Post:

And the line in Western Sahara marking the northern border with Morocco disappears for Moroccans seeking it out on the Web — along with the region’s name altogether. The sparsely populated northwest Africa region is disputed between Morocco, which seized it in 1975, and the indigenous Sahrawi.

Sometimes that flies in the face of international consensus. Google Maps users inside Turkey can find the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, or TRNC, represented in the northern third of the Mediterranean island nation. The territory is not recognized by the United Nations, nor Google’s mapping competitors.

There are other places around the world where Apple and Google show downright crazy or incorrect things on maps. The latter have one thing in common: they are to comply with the demands of countries governed by thin-skinned autocratic men who surround themselves with sycophants. As mentioned above, in China, Taiwan is falsely labelled as a province of China in Apple Maps.⁴ (Google Maps, like Google services generally, aren’t available in China.) In 2021, in a report for The Information headlined “Inside Tim Cook’s Secret $275 Billion Deal with Chinese Authorities”, Wayne Ma reported:

Sometime in 2014 or early 2015, China’s State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping told members of the Apple Maps team to make the Diaoyu Islands, the objects of a long-running territorial dispute between China and Japan, appear large even when users zoomed out from them. Chinese regulators also threatened to withhold approval of the first Apple Watch, scheduled for release in 2015, if Apple didn’t comply with the unusual request, according to internal documents.

Some members of the team back at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., initially balked at the demand. But the Maps app had become a priority for Apple, so eventually the company complied. The Diaoyu Islands, when viewed in Apple Maps in mainland China, continue to appear on a larger scale than surrounding territories.

You’ll stand on firm ground criticizing Apple for capitulating to China’s demands on that. But the root problem clearly isn’t Apple. It’s that China is governed by communist authoritarians, and authoritarianism warps minds — including those of the authoritarian leaders themselves. You know what no one says? “The leadership of China is completely sane and sensible, and their edicts are based on reality, not dogma.”

If you don’t see that Trump’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico is on the same spectrum of nuttiness, then your mind, at least on this matter, has been warped. We can argue how far along that spectrum this “Gulf of America” thing is, but the only reasonable debate is of matters of degree. Apple and Google’s decision to show this made-up name in parentheses to everyone around the world is akin to showing China’s fictionally inflated size of the Diaoyu Islands to everyone in the world, as, say, a dotted outline surrounding the geographically accurate representations of the actual islands’ sizes. There’s a word for this stuff, and that word is propaganda.

Imagine if the government of France decreed that the English Channel was now the “French Channel”. Now imagine that Google and Apple Maps complied, even just to the degree of changing the label, outside France (which, per their company policies, should see “French Channel”) and the United Kingdom (which would still see only “English Channel”) to show the rest of the world, including us in the United States, “English Channel (French Channel)”. It would rightfully be considered insulting nonsense.

The only difference from my hypothetical and our reality with the Gulf of Mexico is that France, in addition to not having a narcissistic would-be autocrat as its president (yet?), is not the world’s lone remaining superpower. That’s what makes Google’s and Apple’s acquiescence worrisome, not merely irritating. As New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie pithily observed over the weekend, on Bluesky, “My take is that your willingness to accept this Gulf of America nonsense is an indicator of your willingness to accept much worse things coming from this administration.”

The calculus Google and Apple should naturally be striving to achieve is finding the correct balance between two axes. One axis is integrity: both the cartographic integrity of the labels on the companies’ maps, and the institutional integrity — dignity even — of the companies themselves. Billions of people around the world trust Google and Apple. Their decisions on this mapping matter — no matter how trivial in the grand scheme of things — should strengthen, not erode, that trust.

The other axis is the minimization of controversy.

Simply maximizing integrity — by ignoring the “Gulf of America” name completely — would incur volcanic controversy within the United States. This calculated balance is behind my suggestion of showing “Gulf of America (Gulf of Mexico)” within the United States, and showing just “Gulf of Mexico” everywhere else. Perhaps the inclusion of the longstanding name within parentheses is too much for freedom-fry-eating Republicans. But showing the new “Gulf of America” name in parentheses to everyone around the world is itself incurring controversy, and, more tellingly, is a strike against the integrity of both the companies and their maps.

Obsequiousness is inherently undignified. Google and Apple are proud companies. But both have chosen a gratuitously undignified presentation of this new American-dictated name to the entire world. Their mutual decision here ultimately seems driven not by integrity (to be sure), nor the minimization of controversy, but instead by a third, unnatural factor: fear.

Neither company will comment on it but surely this issue — inconsequential in the grand scheme of things though it may be — rose to the highest ranks of leadership. I’ll eat my hat if Sundar Pichai and Tim Cook didn’t both sign off on, if not actively participate in the decision-making process, how to represent the Gulf of Mexico’s name. Much serious thought and consideration, from very smart people in Mountain View and Cupertino, went into determining how to respond to a profoundly silly and thoughtless executive order. But so eager are Pichai and Cook to avoid the wrath and vindictiveness of Trump that they’re willing to peddle his foolish “Gulf of America” name to everyone in the world who doesn’t live in Mexico. Wrapping it in parentheses is like wrapping a dead fish in newspaper — it doesn’t contain the stench.

Of course “The Gulf of America” name is stupid. Trump is stupid. Not stupid meaning dim or dull — would that he were, but he remains sharp, cunning, and highly agitated — but stupid because he’s nuts, warped by a narcissistic disorder of Napoleonic dimensions. The new name is as stupid as his MAGA hats are ugly. He might as well have sold the naming rights to Musk and Tesla. There is something really wrong with him, and this “Gulf of America” name change exemplifies at least one aspect of his narcissistic insanity. Everyone knows it. Even his supporters know it. They just tell themselves it’s fine. It’s how tribalism morphs into cultism.

The false note in Hans Christian Andersen’s parable “The Emperor’s New Clothes” is that once the emperor is called out, for in fact strutting around stark naked while ostensibly wearing a suit of clothes so fine that they’ve visible only to the eyes of smart and discerning people, is that all the townsfolk laugh at him. That wouldn’t happen. Many would laugh. Most, one hopes. But the emperor’s die-hard supporters would react with anger at the outburst of mockery, not join in the laughter. He looks great, they’d insist, not like the jackass their own lying eyes tell them he is.

There is something wrong with Trump — and there is something lesser, but worrisomely wrong with those defending him.

Apple Maps and Google Maps do not consider themselves cartographic editorial authorities. They choose not to show one universal set of mapping (and naming) data to the world. They could. But they don’t. Actual editorial authorities, on the other hand, are under no obligation to follow the US GNIS’s official decisions. Wikipedia correctly still calls it The Gulf of Mexico. The Associated Press, whose stylebook is followed by many publications, small and large, issued the following guidance after Trump’s executive order last month:

President Donald Trump has signed an executive order to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. The body of water has shared borders between the U.S. and Mexico. Trump’s order only carries authority within the United States. Mexico, as well as other countries and international bodies, do not have to recognize the name change.

The Gulf of Mexico has carried that name for more than 400 years. The Associated Press will refer to it by its original name while acknowledging the new name Trump has chosen. As a global news agency that disseminates news around the world, the AP must ensure that place names and geography are easily recognizable to all audiences.

The Trump administration — petty, stupid, vindictive, and most of all, insecure fools that they are — has lashed out, and is now in the midst of a weeklong standoff during which they’ve prevented AP journalists from attending official events, entirely and solely because of the AP’s perfectly reasonable style guidance on the Gulf’s name. If Trump and his 2.0 administration had any modicum of confidence that this name change is correct and justified, they’d roll their eyes, not lash out, at the Associated Press for continuing to stipulate otherwise. What kind of government does stuff like that? Everyone knows the answer: tin-pot dictator autocracies. (And would-be autocracies, we can hope.)⁵ This whole “Gulf of America” thing is, if you take a step back, objectively hilarious. Like Pinocchio turning into a real boy, Trump renaming the Gulf of Mexico is like a late night comedy joke turned real. It’s beyond parody. If this had been on SNL during the 2024 campaign, you’d have laughed. And you should laugh now. Mockery is a powerfully subversive weapon against authority — even more effective, I’d argue, than a guitar.

But it’s worth directing our laughter at Google and Apple as well. They’re squandering their own hard-earned reputations for integrity to suggest there’s even a parenthetical alternative-name level of international legitimacy — not merely one man’s vanity — behind this. There isn’t.