Google sounds like it's had enough of the US renaming bodies of water

Things are weird right now in America. The current administration has expressed little interest in abiding by traditional norms, and that’s arguably no clearer than in its unprecedented efforts to rename international bodies of water with jingoistic “American” titles. While Google Maps has so far demonstrated nothing but willingness to deface its maps with the new names, it turns out that there may be one line it’s just not interested in crossing.

Yesterday evening, reports The Washington Post, the president told a crowd in South Carolina that he asked Google CEO Sundar Pichai whether he’d be up to “handle” renaming the Atlantic Ocean.

Pichai, to his credit, supposedly rejected the idea outright: “No, no, no. This time, I’m not doing it.” Specifically, he cited the broader international implications involved with renaming something quite that big.

This whole embarrassing affair got started early last year when the administration insisted that the Gulf of Mexico should be known as the Gulf of America. Then, just a couple months back, it took that xenophobia up north with a push to similarly rename Lake Ontario. Google complied in both cases.

Not everyone has been so eager, though, and even as the biggest tech giants continued to make gestures to show fealty, smaller players like MapQuest have used the opportunity to stand out by rejecting the name changes.

Earlier, Google had stated that it intends to follow Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) naming conventions. For the moment, at least, the GNIS still uses “Atlantic Ocean.” If that does ever change, we’ll be very curious to see whether Google ultimately complies, or if Pichai’s words here really do represent the limit of Google’s ability to tolerate these antics.