[jlangenauer]

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.

[tazjin]

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.

[nix-zarathustra]

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.

[persnickety]

We'll all be better off by shifting to a borderless paradigm. Yandex is just a canary in the coal mine.

[NikolaNovak]

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)

[persnickety]

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.

[mihaic]

I am pretty sure that you needed to know who controlled what territory all across human history.

The planet is populated everywhere, and you need to know who's in power pretty much everywhere you're going, or else you might have a bad time.

[NikolaNovak]

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!:)

[persnickety]

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?

[viraptor]

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.

[persnickety]

When we're borderless, there's no border for your car to cross.

[viraptor]

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.

[persnickety]

We stopped requiring photos on CVs because some employers cared about them a lot (in order to discriminate).

[sofixa]

> No country is seriously considering it

Schengen says hi.

[mchaver]

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.

[SOLAR_FIELDS]

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

[agent327]

How will you know which laws apply?

[manuelmoreale]

I guess the next logical step after the borderless society is a lawless one /s

More seriously, as much as I’d love to live in a different world, borders are not going anywhere.

[slowhand09]

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...

[infecto]

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.

[master_crab]

Guy in tweet also adds:

“Major provocation from China.”

If this is a major provocation I’d hate to see what he considers something more substantive than a UI change.

[zmgsabst]

Why should Israel respond as if this is less serious than China does when Taiwan is listed on a map?

China is extremely offended when that happens — and should be held to the same standard, regarding others.

[master_crab]

China is extremely offended by a lot of things done by a lot of countries. Welcome to the club.

What this definitely is not is a major provocation.

[happytoexplain]

>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.

[Waterluvian]

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.

[kkzz99]

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

[bigger_inside]

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.

[infamia]

> 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.

[FroshKiller]

Not that I agree with the tweet's conclusion, but pray share one of the obvious alternative explanations.

[viraptor]

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...

[hluska]

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.

[aaomidi]

This literally happens constantly in contested regions, even on google maps.

[hluska]

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?

[mcphage]

What's the... I guess, non-alternative explanation?