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 US.

Marketplace Tech reached out to Google, Apple and Microsoft for a statement clarifying their approach to renaming bodies on their digital maps. Apple and Microsoft did not provide one. Google redirected us to their X post.

Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with, Sterling Quinn Professor of Geography at Central Washington University, about whether tech companies generally have standard operating procedures around name changes.

The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Sterling Quinn: 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 handled disputes have kind of gone away, and we just see little glimpses in them now and then, like the posts that Google put on X last week explaining how it was going to handle this change.

Stephanie Hughes: And I mean, is the goal basically to avoid controversy? That Google doesn’t want to be in the business of naming naming places?

Quinn: I think we have to kind of step back and ask ourselves the question, why are most of the maps that we use these days made by big tech companies? These maps were built as part of a business that supports search and advertising. If you can attach search results or advertising to a location, that’s very powerful, and it also takes a lot of technical resources to build a multi-scale, fast map of the world that you can serve out to billions of people, and only a few companies have the ability to do all of that. And so we wind up in this situation where these companies are the ones kind of showing us the geography that we begin to understand. I remember the days of paper maps, but my students, who are undergraduates here, many of them have grown up with just the digital map and the view of the world that that brings, but that is a view that can sometimes be filtered based on market expectations that these companies and the goals that they have in building these map platforms.

Hughes: What alternatives do people have? You know, are there any lesser known companies or organizations that take different approaches for digital mapping?

Quinn: A map that I’ve studied quite a bit, that I think is interesting is Open Street Map, that map is made in a crowd sourced way, and it’s more like a database of information from the world that’s used to make maps. So there are a lot of corporations that contribute data into Open Street Map, but it does have more of a community ethos to it, and it’s a non-profit foundation. So that’s an interesting case for studying map conflict, because the contributors to Open Street Map themselves may have strong disagreements about where borders and names should go, it’s just that those play out sometimes in more transparent ways. There’s discussion posts and online forums where people talk about their decisions on Open Street Map, with what corporations like Google and Microsoft are doing, we often have very little information about how they make their decisions, unless they decide to make some posts like Google did on X, explaining this Gulf of America change.

Hughes: And that’s interesting, you thought that what Google gave us on X was transparency?

Quinn: I’m not sure I’d go that far, but they are at least revealing something, whereas many times we have no idea what is behind this. There was a team in 2016 with some scientists at Northeastern and other universities that actually built a tool to read or scrape the maps from Google from all of its localizations, so they could try to identify areas where Google was customizing boundaries. I mean, that kind of thing is how we know a little bit of what they do. It was almost an attempt to reverse engineer or to peer behind the curtain of what is going on. But companies don’t actively talk about these map customizations that they do by region.

Hughes: You’re a college professor. How do you talk with your students about these issues?

Quinn: I just like to encourage students and others, when they view maps, to think about the motives and objectives of those who created the map, and rather than viewing a map as kind of an objective, scientific truth or just the only way to see the world, realize that there are multiple ways to depict and show the world, and map makers have to make decisions all the time about what things they include in the map, how much prominence they give each thing, the labels and language that they use when describing things. And as students learn how to make their own maps and read maps, they think more deeply about those topics.

More on this

In addition to thinking about the motives of mapmakers, Sterling Quinn told me it’s important for people to look at lots of different maps and consider the variety of ways they depict the world.

One that Quinn recommends is a wall map called the “Essential Geography of the United States of America.” In addition to roads and cities, it also has cultural landmarks like the Iditarod Trail and the Kennedy Space Center. Quinn says that many things become visible upon closer examination and you can tell it’s not made by a machine.