Apple Maps has renamed the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America,” falling in line with an executive order Donald Trump issued demanding the name change.
Trump said just before his inauguration he wanted to change the name, and quickly did so after he took office. The president’s rationale for changing the name was that the U.S. does more work on the gulf than any other nation, and thus he declared flatly: “It’s ours.”
Trump flew over the gulf in Air Force One on Super Bowl Sunday and proclaimed the day “Gulf of America Day.” The U.S. Geographic Names Information System officially changed the name of the gulf on Sunday.
Apple changed the gulf’s name on Tuesday.
The company made the decision after Google Maps made a similar change. Google announced last month that it would make the change in accordance with Trump’s order last month. But the body of water will remain the “Gulf of Mexico” in Mexico, and both names will appear everywhere else on Google maps outside of the U.S. and Mexico.
Google said in a statement Monday the name change was “consistent with our longstanding practices” of changing names for any nation if the switch is updated in local official documents.
Google has also said it will “quickly” change the name of North America’s tallest peak, Alaska’s Denali, to Mt. McKinley, as Trump has demanded in a move that has triggered furious criticism, once official documents are updated.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, who has had several skirmishes with Trump since he took office, complained that if Google is going to so cavalierly switch map names she wants the company to change the name of the U.S. to “América Mexicana,” as it was referred to on official maps beginning in the 1600s.
Sheinbaum objected to Trump and Google’s guly name grab in a letter addressed to Google that she showed reporters last week.
The U.S. cannot unilaterally change the name of a body of water which it shares with Cuba and Mexico because the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea dictates that an individual country’s sovereign territory only extends up to 12 nautical miles from the coastline, she noted.
“If a country wants to change the designation of something in the sea, it would only apply up to 12 nautical miles,” Sheinbaum told reporters. “It cannot apply to the rest, in this case, the Gulf of Mexico. This is what we explained in detail to Google.”
Microsoft has followed Trump’s orders, changing the name on its Bing maps app.
“We are committed to providing users with accurate and up-to-date information,” a Microsoft spokesperson told The Hill.
The Trump administration is reportedly taking offense at institutions that do not bend the knee when it comes to the gulf’s name; The Associated Press said one of its reporters was barred from a Trump event on Tuesday because the wire service announced it was going to continue referring to the gulf as the Gulf of Mexico.
“It is alarming that the Trump administration would punish AP for its independent journalism,” executive editor Julie Pace said in a statement. “Limiting our access to the Oval Office based on the content of AP’s speech not only severely impedes the public’s access to independent news, it plainly violates the First Amendment.”