A week after U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order for the U.S. to recognize the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America,” Google says it will change the name for U.S. users of Google Maps.
Trump’s executive order, signed on inauguration day, directed that “the area formerly known as the Gulf of Mexico … officially be renamed the Gulf of America.”
While the U.S. unilaterally changing the name of the body of water does not oblige other countries to recognize the name change, U.S. users of Google Maps will see the new name on their cellphones.
Google Maps will also change the name of Denali to Mount McKinley after Trump reverted to the old name for the Alaskan peak, rolling back an Obama-era order.
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“We’ve received a few questions about naming within Google Maps. We have a longstanding practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources,” tech giant Google said in a post on the social media site known as X.
Google said its policy is to update names when the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) in the United States is updated.
“When that happens, we will update Google Maps in the U.S. quickly to show Mount McKinley and Gulf of America,” it said in a post on X.
Google said it has a “longstanding policy” that when official names vary between countries, Maps users see their official local name and everyone in the rest of the world sees both names.
“That applies here too,” Google said.
Trump’s executive order directed U.S. Secretary of the Interior Walter Cruickshank to update the GNIS within 30 days of the order being signed.
“The area formerly known as the Gulf of Mexico has long been an integral asset to our once burgeoning Nation and has remained an indelible part of America,” the executive order said.
The executive order, titled “Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness,” also restores the name of Mount McKinley, which the Obama administration renamed Denali in 2015 to honour Alaska’s Indigenous history and the Athabascan people of the region.
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