- Google said Monday it will enforce changes to the U.S. map, including changing the “Gulf of Mexico” to the “Gulf of America,” following an executive order President Donald Trump passed his first day back in office.
Google will be making some changes to its U.S. maps in accordance with one of President Donald Trump’s first executive actions of his second term. The tech giant said Monday it would update its maps, changing the “Gulf of Mexico” to the “Gulf of America.”
Trump signed an executive order Jan. 20 to change certain geographic names to “honor American greatness” and “promote the extraordinary heritage of our Nation and ensure future generations of American citizens celebrate the legacy of our American heroes.” The changes, overseen by the secretary of the Interior, also include reverting the name of Alaskan mountain Denali to Mount McKinley, a reversal of a change introduced under former President Barack Obama in 2015 to honor Alaska’s native population. Google will also refer to Denali as Mount McKinley.
“We’ve received a few questions about naming within Google Maps,” Google said in a post on X Monday. “We have a longstanding practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources.”
Before Google makes any changes to its maps, it awaits an update to the government database Geographic Names Information System, part of the U.S. Geological Survey.
Trump’s executive order criticized Obama’s decision to change the name of Mount McKinley to Denali, saying the nomenclature was an “affront” to 25th President William McKinley, who, like Trump, “championed tariffs” and U.S. manufacturing. McKinley never visited Alaska, but a gold prospector advocated for America’s tallest mountain to be named in 1896 for McKinley, the Republican presidential candidate, who was a large proponent of the gold standard. The native Athabascan people of Alaska have long called the mountain Denali.
Tech’s enforcement of geographic name changes
Following the Department of the Interior’s August 2015 order, Google updated the name of the mountain to Denali within days, while Microsoft-owned Bing continues to refer to the site as Mount McKinley on its maps.
Though Google has abided by government-ordered name changes in the past, the announcement it will enforce Trump’s executive order comes amid a wave of changes in the tech industry that reflect a bending toward the agenda of the new White House administration.
Google donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund earlier this month, and Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet, sat among fellow tech giants like Apple CEO Tim Cook and Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg—who also donated seven-digit amounts to the fund—at the Jan. 20 ceremony. Meanwhile, Meta announced earlier this month it would end third-party fact-checking on its apps, beginning in the U.S., and instead use X-style community notes appeasing a wave of conservatives who previously criticized the company for not prioritizing “free expression.” Google did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
Thus far, Apple has continued to use the pre-executive-action names for the locations and did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment on plans to change any names on its maps.
In Mexico, the name of the body of water will remain the Gulf of Mexico. Around the world, Google users will see both names, a convention Google uses for geographic names that vary across countries, the company said.
