I see we're going from "UI changes, the cause or reason of which we don't know" to "geopolitics" without considering any of the obvious alternative explanations.
If China decides (and no-one is saying that it has) that it no longer recognizes Israel, then it will simply announce that, and not get a private company to make subtle UI changes to reflect a secret policy instead.
Reminds me of the problems with contested borders, which e.g. Yandex runs into because they operate in Western and non-Western jurisdictions. They ended up just removing all national borders from the maps for this reason, which has made the UX worse, especially for international trip planning.
Google (used to?) opts for a different approach where some borders are drawn based on where they geolocated you to.
I'm pretty sure Yandex removed all borders was because the Russian government annexed territory but they hadn't clarified the territory borders that were annexed, so Yandex decided to be on the safe side and remove all borders to avoid this issue.
I mean, depends on use case right? Certainly for travel and navigation purposes I very much want to know when I'm about to leave a country :-). For any economical or political review as well, country birders are extremely relevant data.
There certainly are geology and other scientific endeavours which perhaps don't care too much for countries, but even they probably need them when they interface with regular humans (I.e. This lake is in such and such country, this volcano is about to explode over there, etc)
Tourist endeavors really care about borders for 2 aspects: as barriers, and as places where legal or social rules change. If administrative borders had their powers limited to, say, statistical purposes, and not social obstacles, a tourist would stop caring about them.
Interfacing with humans does not necessarily have to be done along social borders. I'm sure it wasn't that way before the rise of the nation-state. Everyone knows where the Alps are, or where the Great Lakes are. Pretty much every place on Earth is covered by some geographical-not-political area name. Why shouldn't places be referred to in that way? It's harder to politically push for a change in the definition of the Gobi Desert than of an arbitrary administrative unit.
If I'm reading it correctly then, you're aftually advocating for a massive paradigm change in our social and political life, and not for a small UI change in mapping software.
Which I did not pick up from your initial post within this context, but fair enough!:)
I'm actually curious about the UI change in mapping software as well. The current cartography is focused on human-scale things, rather than geological-scale things. It's hard to find a map that gives topography as much space as it gives to roads, even when visiting some mountain ranges. In the lowlands, tourist maps still focus on roads and town names disproportionately more than on the type of environment and natural landmarks.
On a global scale, when the country borders are removed, we find ourselves lost, despite the huge ecological and geological diversity of the place, which makes our - or at least mine - experience as a inhabitant of this amazing place so much poorer. Compare the difficulty of finding the Atacama desert versus Luxembourg. How often do you see a whole-Earth map with the desert marked but not the state?
When you're near a border you typically don't want to get your car ride routed over 2 border crossings just because it's the shortest path. Skipping the borders is definitely not a "better off" situation.
Yandex removing displayed borders doesn't move us in any way closer to borderless world in reality. No country is seriously considering it. It's not a canary for anything - they stopped displaying borders exactly because countries/people care about those a lot.
But it's categorically different. Removing pictures from CVs so that corps are unable to discriminate based on that image still maintains the concept of "employee". Doesn't removing borders effectively remove the concept of "citizen/national"?
The subject of a CV is the human, but the subject of a map is the place. Removal of borders removes the concept of a citizen, but maps are concerned with the concept of an area. Nothing of value is lost. In more practical terms, I have not encountered maps that explicitly mention the concept of a citizen, other than by drawing nation-state borders, or those that are concerned with immigration (but for those, it's a relevant concept).
First, if you remove detail about a person from a CV, that person still has those characteristics.
It's not clear what effect "removing borders from maps" has - if you are suggesting having no borders as in your original comment, or having them, but just removing them from maps.
In the latter case it would be massively inconvenient to not know where borders are, if there are visa issues. Plus, there isn't really an equivalence to "illegally discriminating based on seeing the border". The appearance of a single, otherwise anon individual, versus international agreement on where the borders are seem to be v. different things.
As such, interpreting as the former; "maps are concerned with the concept of an area" - they are as concerned with navigation as anything else, so include roads, and borders plus border stops. "I have not encountered maps that explicitly mention the concept of a citizen" no, but they usually name the country - I mention citizen from the perspective on how it impacts travel; presumably removing borders means there are no territories, and thus no countries; but a country is as much a collection of people (citizens) so both diminish, unless you maintain a territory-less concept of citizenship.
Not clear to me "Nothing of value is lost" - tell me how this would impact, say, Israel? or anywhere bordering Russia. Or are you only taking from the about specific cherry-picked locales?
> "illegally discriminating based on seeing the border"
The problem is closer to: "the presence of pictures on CVs is detrimental to someone due to outside bias", "the presence of borders on maps is detrimental to Yandex due to outside bias". Not quite the same mechanism, but similar in spirit.
> they are as concerned with navigation as anything else
All maps are concerned with an area, some with navigation. A map of the Moon is still interesting to some non-astronauts.
I concede, if you use a map for navigation, a concept of a national border is still relevant. But in other cases, given the variety of possible geographical data, it rarely is.
These border checks are waived, not abolished. In times of crisis, they can (and were, during the Pandemic for example) reinstated. Countries can impose movement restriction for internal regions as well, but these carry a much higher legal overhead.
Also, Schengen borders are transparent only for full EU residents. If your visa and right of abode is restricted to a particular country, the borders are still very relevant.
Even for EU residents, the borders are still relevant as they demarcate places with quite different civil and penal law codes.
That's a big hypothetical. Mapping companies are not the arbiters of where borders exist. Knowledge of where de facto borders are is pretty useful for directions.
A nice fantasy, but something tells me a borderless reality is not in our near term or distant future. Maybe by the time Star Trek is more fact than fiction
You should run for congress... wait, no borders means no countries so no congress. Just a bunch of really powerful people making rules over fiefdoms...
This to me is like saying your a sovereign citizen. The world would be better off if we all shared resources and everyone enjoyed some minimum of quality of life while there still be strong desires from individuals to create. Its a nice idea but not a reality that is possible.
>China is extremely offended by a lot of things done by a lot of countries
Yes, that's bad. Hence, "should be held to the same standard". You may reasonably disagree with that, but as it stands your implication is that the more bad things a country does, the less we should care.
China publishes an official political map each year, which the companies must treat as canon. They also swapped a contested half-Russian island to being fully China. I think it’s a way to assert some politics at a lower volume.
I can’t say for sure this is that, but I can say for sure that there is tremendous political power in cartography and the simplest act of choosing the label levels for placenames. This move has been done countless times before so I wouldn’t be surprised at all if it’s intentional.
The truth is that this was always the case, no change happened. All that happened was that a known anti-china fake news "reporter" associated with the falun gong cult was spreading lies on twitter. See for example here: https://twitter.com/CurtExplores/status/1719334699599122690
it also has little incentive to do so, as it's positioning itself as a possible mediator, one that also does a lot of business with Israel. And remember, the thing that led to the short animosity between China and the Soviet Union (well, one of the things) was that the SU was a country with a mission to spread its system, while China wasn't, and isn't. China seeks to do business with everyone without telling them how to run their affairs, quite unlike the US.
The more likely explanation is that the companies are catering to their custmer base. As in most of the world, there is huge public support to stop the killing of Gazans. Western companies, and companies in Wester-capured neocolonies, can't show support for Gaza. Maybe this is ALibaba testing out if it can. It'll be interesting to see if it lasts, or if it gets changed again in a few days. This should tell you more.
> China seeks to do business with everyone without telling them how to run their affairs, quite unlike the US.
Tell that to the Austrailians and now the Israelis, where China has sent a naval task force. China is building aircraft carriers like nobody's businesss for force remote projection, which is the one thing they're really good at. China has the same desire to project force as the US, they simply lack the means to do so as effectively. Their recent actions in the Gulf is proof enough of that.
Changes in that area, resulting in broken database entries and skipping the country entry/label. People break stuff all the time. Let's see if it stays missing for more than a couple of days...
The obvious alternative explanations?? Like they just randomly and accidentally decided to erase an entire state? Particularly an extremely contested state? Give me a break - you’re really not making a good argument.
Can you show me an example of a UN country being erased from a map during a major event in which others are calling for them to be wiped off the globe?
If China decides (and no-one is saying that it has) that it no longer recognizes Israel, then it will simply announce that, and not get a private company to make subtle UI changes to reflect a secret policy instead.