This isn't really on Google. Countries disagree on how things should be named. Google sources the US centric view from the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS).
Blame the person causing the GNIS updates.
Blame the person causing the GNIS updates.
Do you really expect a US based company to go to legal war with the US government over something like this? Because there would 100% be repercussions it they did.
I think the US administration name change is childish, dumb and short-sighted, but if the authority of geographical names in an area designates it as such then I think it should show as such within maps within that area, at least as long as the clarification is readily shown. The same already happens for things like "Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas)" or "Myanmar (Burma)".
I guess the question comes down to: do you want google to show the map that your current locality decides to be their interpretation or do you want google to be the arbiter of what a global real map is? Or is there a third alternative that I'm not aware of? (BTW the UN is not a solution to arbiter every countries and languages terms for every country/area/city/lake/ocean/etc.)
No, but they are certainly the arbiter of what names they use on the maps they produce.
But no, I don't want them to take a political stance on every naming dispute. In this case, however, when the "dispute" is between a clearly incompetent president and the nation he presides over, yes, seeing companies standing up against the madness would be welcome.
Yes, because it’s so agonizingly difficult to `s/Lake America/Lake Ontario/g` in a data feed. Truly the engineering feat of our time.