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> governments control the naming of these things within their own jurisdictions No they don't. People can, and should, call things what they want without defer
by bigstrat2003 1mo ago
> governments control the naming of these things within their own jurisdictions
No they don't. People can, and should, call things what they want without deference to government overreach.
- ThoseWhoSquirm 1mo agoWe can do that for ourselves, but it's a lot harder for the operator of a massive maps platform, based from its inception on the use of the federally controlled GNIS, to just call things what they want, or even what most of their users want things to be called. For once I'm posting about this in a forum where I can reasonably expect that most users will understand the technical difficulties that would arise if Google wanted to avoid using the new names. The average person seems to believe that Google can change the toponyms back to Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario as easily as taking down a road sign and nailing up a different one.