
The First Google Maps War - georgecmu
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/28/the-first-google-maps-war/?src=un&feedurl=http%3A%2F%2Fjson8.nytimes.com%2Fpages%2Fopinion%2Findex.jsonp
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tokenadult
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...](http://www.globalization-group.com/edge/2011/01/india-ban-of-microsoft-
os-costs-millions/)

and plenty of other countries get into disputes about maps.

[http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/21/manchurian-t...](http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/21/manchurian-
trivia/)

AFTER EDIT:

The sources here

[https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-
factbook/...](https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-
factbook/fields/2070.html)

and especially here (LONG)

[http://www.law.fsu.edu/journals/transnational/vol13_1/donova...](http://www.law.fsu.edu/journals/transnational/vol13_1/donovan.pdf)

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

~~~
brown9-2
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?

~~~
yahelc
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>

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techiferous
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>

~~~
jballanc
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.

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kizza
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.

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

~~~
Half_a_Bee
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.

~~~
tagawa
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.

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techiferous
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>

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

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TechNewb
>>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.

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

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JordyB
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.

