Marketplace Tech With Molly Wood

Geography has been part of President Trump’s agenda. His first day on the job, he signed an executive order changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, and Denali, the highest peak in North America, will now go back to being called Mount McKinley.Private companies that make maps — analog or digital — don’t have to follow suit but at least one is.Google said in a post on X that it has long had a practice of applying name changes from official government sources. So, once the official federal naming database is changed, it’ll update Google Maps for people in the US.Marketplace Tech reached out to Google, Apple and Microsoft for a statement clarifying their approach to renaming bodies on their digital maps. Apple and Microsoft did not provide one. Google redirected us to their X post.Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with, Sterling Quinn Professor of Geography at Central Washington University, about whether tech companies generally have standard operating procedures around name changes. Th