Does a name change really happen unless it happens on the internet?

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Stephanie Hughes.

Geography has been part of President Trump's agenda.

His first day on the job, he signed an executive order, changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico

to the Gulf of America.

And Denali, the highest peak in North America, will now go back to being called Mount McKinley.

Private companies that make maps, analog or digital, don't have to follow suit, but at least one is.

Google said in a post on X that it has long had a practice of applying name changes from official

government sources. So, once the official federal naming database is changed, it'll update Google Maps for

people in the U.S. as well.

Sterling Quinn studies digital maps as a professor of geography at Central Washington University.

I asked him if tech companies generally have standard operating procedures around name changes.

10 to 20 years ago when online maps were newer, we saw these companies putting out long, detailed statements and policies about how they were going to handle disputed boundaries and place

names, almost like they were kind of aiming for a single correct depiction of the world.

And over time, as they received feedback from people who don't agree sometimes over the boundaries

and place names, I think they realized it was more complicated, but also they wanted to be

able to maintain their business operation in the smoothest way.

So their statements changed over time to talk about how their changes would support the company's mission or local market expectations.

And that was actually closer to the truth of what they started doing. So over time, their statements

about how they handle disputes have kind of gone away. And we just see little glimpses on them now

and then like the posts that Google put on X explaining how it was going to handle this change.

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