Trump would rename the Atlantic Ocean, Google resists

Donald Trump recounted how he tried to persuade Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, to finally give the Atlantic Ocean a name worthy of it too — preferably his own, or at least America's — because apparently there are still too many labels on the world map that don't make people think of the American president. According to the story he told at a campaign rally in South Carolina on October 21, he personally called the company's chief to find out whether the renaming could be done on Google Maps, but this time Pichai said no.

According to Trump's account, Google's chief explained the refusal by saying that oceans connect several countries, so he asked Trump not to expect such a name change from them. In the end, the president concluded that he would probably let the idea go and the name Atlantic Ocean could stay; however, we only know the details of the phone call from his own retelling, since Google has not confirmed the story when approached by the press. For now, geography has escaped becoming yet another advertising space for the presidential real-estate empire.

The idea is not without precedent, since Google had previously switched American users from the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, and Trump apparently figured that if a gulf could be done, an ocean shouldn't pose much of a technical challenge either. He would reserve his own name or America's exclusively for the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, though — he wouldn't bother with the rest; after all, it's reassuring that some kind of presidential quality control applies even to branding the planet with a personal name.

Ugar