The First Google Maps War | Hacker News Reader

The First Google Maps War

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com

37 pointsgeorgecmu15 comments

One of the most startling things I learned in law school is that in international law, it really matters what maps say. If your country publishes officially, or allows to be published privately, maps that show a particular set of borders, other countries can use that printed evidence to support a claim in international law that your country accepts those borders. This is one reason why many maps published in the United States include the statement "Boundary representations not authoritative" if there is any doubt or dispute at all about the proper way to draw the boundary line on the map.

When I first lived in Taiwan (1982), under the former Nationalist Party dictatorship, one way the dictatorship showed up in daily life was world maps with BIZARRE territorial claims for the Republic of China, the official name of the regime that still rules Taiwan. Those maps of course showed both Taiwan and the mainland regions of China proper as one country colored in by one map color on the map, but they also showed no country of Mongolia at all--all of that territory was colored as for China--and a northern border of China that spanned Lake Baikal in Russia. (I even saw a historical world globe in a display in the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial in Taipei showing the entire Korean Peninsula in the same map coloring as China, but that wasn't the usual territorial claim in Taiwan by the 1980s, in the interest of friendly diplomatic relations with South Korea.) I also have English-language dictionaries bought during that stay with whole entries (for example, for "Mongolia") blanked out of the pages. Some countries are quite in earnest about this. Taiwan no longer cares much about such things, but maps of the border region of India are a very sensitive issue in India,

http://www.boundaries.com/India.htm

http://www.globalization-group.com/edge/2011/01/india-ban-of...

and plenty of other countries get into disputes about maps.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/21/manchurian-t...

AFTER EDIT:

The sources here

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

and especially here (LONG)

http://www.law.fsu.edu/journals/transnational/vol13_1/donova...

mention the importance of maps in identifying and resolving international boundary disputes.

Do you have any links to stories of privately produced maps resulting in an internationally accepted decision on official borders?

Seems to me that this would be a rather hard thing to enforce. What's to stop Enemy X from distributing subversive maps inside country Y?

Check out the history of Shebaa Farms, which Israel occupies and believes belongs to Syria, but Lebanon and Syria claim it belongs to Lebanon. Old maps play a significant role in the official UN findings.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shebaa_farms

> If your country publishes officially, or allows to be published privately,

What if your country doesn't have or claim authority over the publications of private map publishers?

Slightly off topic, but there are some insanely convoluted borders in the world, the worst of which is Cooch Behar: http://bigthink.com/ideas/21160?page=all

Also, the border between Belgium and Netherlands: http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/baarle.htm

You think that's bad? Have you ever looked at the way the islands of the Aegean are divided between Greece and Turkey? There are a number of Greek islands that lie almost completely within bays of the Turkish mainland, and there are a number of places where you could literally swim between the two countries.

On the same topic, I found it interesting that Google just completely doesn't label Imia/Kardak. They just appear as blank spots on the map.

Google Maps can display different borders depending on your locale: http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/staticmaps/

region (optional) defines the appropriate borders to display, based on geo-political sensitivities. Accepts a region code specified as a two-character ccTLD ('top-level domain') value.

This story was reported in 2010. Is there anything new in the 2012 NYT rehash, or other developments?

The reporter read about it and thought, with what's going on in Syria, Afghanistan, etc. that it'd be a good use of column-inches to yammer on about a "war" that was never going to escalate into an armed conflict.

Indeed - he talks about the First Google Maps War (and later the possibility of a Second), yet the first line of the article admits it was "almost" a war. Sensationalist headline IMO.

Also of note: a border dispute between Canada and Denmark took place using Google in 2005: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Island#Google_fight

Google Maps also contributed to the ongoing dispute between Cambodia and Thailand over Preah Vihear.

>>Rather, and this is the dangerous part of the whole enterprise, Google Maps’ imprecision reignited a long-standing border dispute that, with a few miscalculations, could have led to a real war.

Hard to have a "real war" without a real standing army.

There are still plenty of land mines in the east of Nicaragua...

I have always wondered where Googles border information comes from.

This article also shows you have to be very careful with things like this. I would never have thought a dispute like this would happen due to Google putting a border in the wrong place.

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