- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
The president of Mexico on Thursday expressed hope that Google “reconsiders” its decision to change its online maps to reflect U.S. President Donald Trump’s claim that he has the authority to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico.
Shortly after taking office, Trump issued an executive order announcing he was changing the name of the body of water to the Gulf of America.
For U.S. users of Google Maps, the gulf was listed as the Gulf of America as of Thursday. Google, whose CEO attended Trump’s inauguration along with other tech moguls, said last month it has “a long-standing practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources.”
But Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum warned Thursday that her government “will file a civil suit” against Google if it does not revert back to labeling the international body of water the Gulf of Mexico.
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I want to know how many of the people here defending Google’s decision would be okay with Google labeling Taiwan as “Taiwan (Chinese Taipei)” for people in Taiwan and also the rest of the world.
Republicans are so good at baiting liberals into useless bullshit arguments, while they plunder stuff that actually matters.
Google also removed the ability to suggest edits to specifically the Gulf.
Guess they knew ahead of time they’d get an influx of requests to change or back.
Ive been already boycotting google, amazon, facebook, reddit. Yall need to get on it
My phone is a Pixel on Google Fi, and I have a YouTube premium account. I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me :( lol
Nah. I’ll start boycotting google when there are useful alternatives. Amazon, facebook, reddit - no problem.
Google search - fine, I can get by with DDG or Yandex. Gmail - sure, whatever. Maps? Organic Maps (and other openstreetmaps front-ends) works alright for getting your bearings, but it’s a far cry from useful for finding businesses, and terrible for navigation. Waze used to be the only viable alternative, but ever since Google bought them, it’s hard to justify a full boycott without massively inconveniencing myself.
Same for meta as a whole. Facebook and Instagram, sure, no need. But living without whatsapp is simply impossible in some countries, where it’s the de-facto standard for communication, and even used as the only means of contact with government agencies.
If you disapprove of internet companies caving to authoritarian politics, I have bad news for you about Yandex
We did it with Lemmy. It CAN be done!
Yeah its true unfortunately
Fr, I try, but it’s really not possible to get away from these companies.
Nobody wants signal, nobody wants mastodon, nobody wants or frankly can use openstreetmaps. Alternatives are just not good enough
Alternatives are just not good enough
And to no fault of their own of course. They just aren’t working with the same resources as Google and the others.
I think it’s more a question of stepping down our level of comfort at this point. Can we live without a particular service that Google provides, when there are no alternatives with feature parity? Or can we live with the fact that some of the features aren’t working as well or missing, and use the alternatives anyway?
Exactly. If there were perfectly interchangeable alternatives, there would have been a true competition and those companies wouldn’t be holding the amount of power they do today in the first place.
Moving to alternatives requires some degree of effort and giving up on some microconforts. There’s no other way. There’s no fight without any pain. If we want to fight those companies, we must sacrifice those micro conforts, even if that means reducing tech use as a whole and doing a few things the “old fashioned” way.
it really sucks when you realise that virtually everything is a US company… and yet everything they sell is made in fucking China
I prefer the name “golfo del gringo loco”
Don’t even bother with a pointless lawsuit. Simply stop using Google.
Nah, they’re a megacorp, you gotta hurt them where it counts - in their bottom line. Make them use their super expensive lawyers to defend this shit. Honestly more people/entities should do this. Even pro se, these corporate lawyers cost these companies literally hundreds of thousands of dollars to go into court. Just imagine how much you could cost them if everyone started suing them for any little thing. Even a response to a lawsuit requires a lawyer, which requires time and effort.
Its literally the only thing they care about - money. Strongly worded letters and protests aren’t enough. They can ignore those.
Google is worth more than Mexico. A frivolous lawsuit, which is what this would be, will hurt Mexico more.
have we (the human race) ever been to this point before? where corporations are big enough to absorb whole countries and there’s pretty much nobody who’ll stand up to them?
The East India Company is the first example that comes to mind. I’m sure others.
I really don’t think we are living through unprecedented times, unfortunately. People have sucked for as long as we’ve existed.
While we are at renaming things…
or we keep american shit inside america. fuck googlemaps, apple and all other shitty US corporations. see, tump will die some day and be forgotten, but people will remember what apple and google did. next time you see someone work for alphabet…spit them in the face. next time an american buys a burger, you spit on it. etc. it is not about actual harm as america is killing itself anyway atm. my bingo card says if trump wins twice, there shall also be two pandemics. maybe protest the egg prices a bit more before using that muri-brain to do sth. against it. americans are just stupid.
Uninstalled 👍
It’s a US company following US policy as it’s a contract holder for the US Government they’re compelled to follow US policy. Whether anyone likes it or not, at least for right now, US policy is that the Gulf of Mexico for all intents and purposes is the Gulf of America.
President Sheinbaum can sue Google all she wants, but there’s no court that’s going to find that a US company complying with US policy is breaking the law.
But it kinda makes sense to be called Gulf of America since it’s located in North America.
Removed by mod
Well, the continent was named America, not the Mexico continent. So the name Gulf of America just sounds right. It’s not like the name changed to the Gulf of US.
President of mexico is just showing themselves to be as big of a baby as trump. Best thing to do is ignore it. Its of such little importance.
Meh I’ll still use Google.
I don’t. DuckDuckGo and an alternative email provider are wonderful.
DuckDuckGo is just Bing. And Microsoft is not any better in terms of kissing Trump’s ass.
Not quite.
DuckDuckGo’s results are a compilation of “over 400” sources according to itself, including Bing, Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha , Yandex, and its own web crawler (the DuckDuckBot); but none from Google. It also uses data from sites such as wikipedia, to populate knowledge panel boxes to the right of the search results.
Its main partnership is with Bing.
And this is why it’s a problem: https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/17/brave_duckduckgo/
Still they’re right - it’s not “just Bing” that’s a bit of an over simplification IMO, like someone saying “firefox is just google chrome” because it uses google search by default.
DDG is still preferable to vanilla bing and google because the privacy is stronger and it produces useful results. There is no perfect search engine, right now we have to compromise.
I can understand why. To each their own.
