A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted 24-26 January found that 70 percent of Americans oppose renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America; only 25 percent support the move.

Google Maps users have been leaving one-star reviews of the Gulf to protest Google’s compliance with the renaming; Google has deleted the reviews and prevented new reviews from being posted. (Users are also review-bombing the Google Maps app itself.) That’s far from Google’s only problem: Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum said today that her government was weighing a lawsuit against Google over the change (AP, Politico).

Meanwhile, the White House continues to punish the Associated Press by denying Oval Office access, and the AP is considering legal action on First Amendment grounds (CNN, NPR, Politico). The AP’s own story hints at one issue: a lot of news organizations follow the AP style, and cowing the AP into submission kills a lot of birds with one stone. In addition, the New York Times and Washington Post say they’ll continue using Gulf of Mexico.

Bloomberg’s Linda Poon provides some history and context to the change and to the renaming process in general, and has quotes from Mark Monmonier and representatives from Rand McNally and TomTom—because the tech giants aren’t the only ones making maps.

Writing for The Atlantic, David Frum sees the renaming of the Gulf as a sign of weakness.

In the age of discovery and conquest, European mariners often named bodies of water after the destination territory on the other side of that water. The Gulf of Mexico is so called because when a Spaniard sailed toward Mexico, the Gulf was the sea that the Spaniard crossed.

Once you understand this practice, you see it everywhere. […]

Bodies of water are typically named by dominant nations not after themselves, but after the subordinate nations on the other side. To rename the Gulf of Mexico “the Gulf of America” is to reconceptualize the United States not as a sending point, but as a receiving point; no longer a country that stamps itself upon history, but a country upon which history is stamped.

Previously: Naming the Gulf; Google Maps to Use ‘Gulf of America’–Others Not So Much; More Reactions to ‘Gulf of America’; Google and the Gulf; ‘Gulf of America’: Apple Conforms, AP Punished for Not Doing So.