Crimea Map

After Vladimir Putin signed a treaty, which the White House said they “reject,”^[i] effectively annexing Crimea,^[ii] Google was faced with a dilemma. How would it represent the geographic area on its service, Google Maps? It ended up showing Crimea as part of Russia, but only to Russian citizens. Yandex, the other big search engine in Russia, reflected a similar approach, Ukrainian and Russian users would see this part of the map as Ukraine and Russia respectively.^[iii]

This move by Google showed that there is a new layer of authority in the digital age that supersedes that of governments and laws -- Google’s perspective through which we search and find the world. I chose this image because it represents the changing world order of the digital age, in which even though it was Vladimir Putin who took the action of making Crimea part of Russia, it was Google who had final say over how this might be perceived and accepted by the entire world.