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Comment by wsc981 | Hacker News Reader

I don't think companies should take a stance on political issues, which is what Google is doing here.

Would actually prefer companies have totally no influence on politics at all, but as we all know, that would be an utopia.

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I don't think this comment makes much sense. If the original name was not political, then the change should be apolitical too. If the choice of text on the .ps page was a "political issue," then google's use of "Palestinian Territories" was already political in a pro-Israeli way – changing it is no worse than keeping up the old text.

Yes, I know you're jumping on the "corporations have too much power" bandwagon, but here I don't think it makes any sense.

How could Google avoid taking a stance? Either they call it one thing or the other. Or they could call every contested bit of land Narnia but then no one would be happy with them.

I agree. The domain name is already in political territory. Maybe if domain names were by language instead of location...

That would be nowhere easier.

Many languages have different names across populations. And people strongly identify to a specific nomenclature.

Also, many people speak multiple languages, languages that cross disputed borders, and languages spoken only by populations that want independence from the current states where they're located (e.g. Basque).

That wouldn't solve or even sidestep any political issues. You've still got problems like: * ip geocoding to decide which language to serve the UI in * what do you call the languages? Chinese vs Traditional vs Simplified, or Farsi vs Parsi vs Persian, as mentioned elsewhere

And while political boundaries are messy, language boundaries are even more so. How do you decide dialect boundaries? And once you do, how do you decide which dialects get separate domains?

"How could Google avoid taking a stance? Either they call it one thing or the other."

Perhaps avoiding taking a stance could take the form of following the current practice of major players (UN and others)...?

Which is exactly what they've just done?

> "In this case, we are following the lead of the UN, Icann, ISO and other international organisations."

Sounds like this was the less political choice, really.

Not if, like OP, you define "political" as, "different than my preference."

You do realise that however they refer to the region ('Palestine' or 'Palestinian Territories'), they're making a political statement.

Their reasoning (following the example of multiple international organisations - including the UN, ICANN, and ISO) is sound.

And it's not just Google that's affected either.

Imagine making a desktop environment and e.g. showing a world map to select your time zone.

Or having a list of countries & regions to assist the user with localization. Seemingly any list of countries you show will "make a political statement" to someone out there. KDE, for example, had many bugs filed about the naming used for what the ISO calls the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

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

http://www.iso.org/iso/home/standards/country_codes/country_...

Redhat actually removed Taiwan from KDE's list of locales to please PRC: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/10/6/173153/329

Why Google made this change, from the article, "In this case, we are following the lead of the UN, Icann [the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers], ISO [International Organisation for Standardisation] and other international organisations."

When it comes to Israel/Palestine, every mapmaker in the world is taking a stance.

> I don't think companies should take a stance on political issues, which is what Google is doing here.

Every possible choice of wording for anything having to do with the area of land bounded by the Mediterranean Sea, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt involves taking a stance on a contentious political issue.

I don't think corporations (or anyone else) should avoid making such choices because they inherently require taking such a stance, nor do I think that they should avoid changing such choices because of that.

My maps show Lebanon with Syria to the north and east, the Mediterranean Sea to the west. I imagine yours do also.

Yeah, yeah.

Edited: Turkey -> Lebanon

Even those bordering countries/areas are unclear. cf Golan Heights (which resulted in Facebook being banned by the Syrian government); and the dispute between Lebanon and Israel on maritime borders.

Talk about messy...

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