The Gulf of Mexico remains in Apple Maps
President Trump signed an executive order demanding that many landmarks change their names, including the Gulf of Mexico, but Apple Maps hasn’t changed. Here’s why it isn’t quite that simple.
Maps are a funny thing. For a long time, we studied global geography using a map designed in 1569, but it inaccurately shows North America and Europe as much larger than they should be.
Nearly five hundred years later, we’ve started adapting more recent models that accurately show continent size. I bring this up simply because maps are complicated and changing the ones we rely on can take a lot of time and effort.
So, when the returning President Trump signed an executive order to change the names of landmarks, it should be easy to understand that it isn’t quite so simple. Even if the U.S. Board on Geographic Names (BGN) standardizes the “Gulf of America,” it only has authority over US federal uses.
Executive orders can only be given to federal or state agencies, not to the general public or private corporations. So, there is no direct ability for any entity to demand that Apple or Google change their mapping systems.
You would think that Representative Dan Crenshaw of Texas would know these things, but he posted on X anyway.
The BGN in the US can direct federal agencies to adopt the name, but the rest of the world likely will still refer to that body of water as the Gulf of Mexico. The United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names (UNGEN) is a group that works with all of the member countries to create a standard, and it seems unlikely that anyone else would be willing to adopt such a superfluous name change.
Apple and Google are global companies that serve everyone maps. They utilize a combination of their own data and public resources to map, name, and lay out everything for users.
The Gulf of Mexico has been called as much for over 400 years. The name comes from Aztec origins since those were the people that resided in the region when the Americas were colonized.
Other countries, generally ones with authoritarian rulers, have tried to coerce Apple and Google to change place names on maps. Like how Russia disagrees with what land Ukraine owns, or that China doesn’t observe Taiwan as a separate entity.
The standardization of names on a map has always held some importance in ensuring everyone reading the map around the world understood what they were looking at. Many countries that don’t use English as their primary language have different names than what are shown on the standardized map. For example, Japan is actually Nihon and Germany is actually Deutschland.
Perhaps the executive order will lead to paper maps and student handbooks showing the Gulf of America in the United States. To the rest of the world — including the US military that adheres to international naming conventions — it’ll be the Gulf of Mexico.
If Crenshaw is upset, perhaps he should start by directing his ire at the BGN, which still lists the Gulf of Mexico in its database. Meanwhile, it seems highly unlikely that Apple will change the name of the location because of one country’s demands.
