How Google's open-ended maps are embroiling the
company in some of the worlds touchiest geopolitical disputes.
One fateful day in early August, Google Maps
turned Arunachal Pradesh Chinese. It happened
without warning. One minute, the mountainous
border state adjacent to Tibet was labeled with
its usual complement of Indian place-names; the
next it was sprinkled with Mandarin characters,
like a virtual annex of the People's Republic.
The error could hardly have been more awkward.
Governed by India but claimed by China, Arunachal
Pradesh has been a source of rankling dispute
between the two nations for decades. Google's
sudden relabeling of the province gave the
appearance of a special tip of the hat toward
Beijing. Its timing, moreover, was freakishly
bad: the press noticed that Google's servers had
started splaying Mandarin place-names all over
the state only a few hours before Indian and
Chinese negotiating teams sat down for talks in
New Delhi to work toward resolving the delicate border issue.
Google rushed to admit its mistake, but not
before a round of angry Indian blog posts and
news articles had flourished online. Some
commentators posited outright conspiracy between
Beijing and the search engine. "Google Maps has
always been more biased towards China over the
Arunachal Pradesh border dispute," surmised an
Indian blogger. Even more ominously, one former
member of Parliament told the Times of India,
"The Chinese know how to time their statements ahead of a bilateral meeting.
Google responded in a manner that radiated chilly
omnipresenceby posting a statement in the
comments section of what appeared to be every
single Web site that had discussed the mix-up.
"The change was a result of a mistake in our
processing of new map data," Google announced.
"We are in the process of reverting the data to
its previous state, and expect the change to be
visible in the product shortly."
One mystery remained, however: how did such an
error happen in "the product" in the first place?
Why did Google have that perfect set of Chinese
names lying around, ready to swap in for the Indian ones?
<http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2010/1007.gravois.html>Link
