The agnostic cartographer: how Google's open-ended maps are embroiling the company in some of the world's touchiest geopolitical disputes.

• Author: Gravois, John

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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 omnipresence--by 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?

Google remained silent on this point, but a Belgian blogger named Stefan Geens pieced together a compelling answer. Within China, Geens pointed out, the law commands that all maps represent "South Tibet" (aka Arunachal Pradesh) as fully Chinese. And Google Maps maintains servers in China that fall under Chinese law. In fact, Google runs an entirely separate maps site, ditu. google.cn, for Chinese users, which operates within the great Chinese firewall. This isn't just a one-off concession to the party leaders in Beijing: Google maintains thirty-two different region-specific versions of its Maps tool for different countries around the world that each abide by the respective local laws. Thus on India's version of Google Maps, for example, all of Kashmir appears as an integral and undisputed part of the country--because Indian law sees it that way. Similarly, "Arunachal Pradesh" is nowhere to be found on ditu.google.cn. What you find instead are all the same Chinese place-names that caused the uproar of Google Maps in August.

"Somehow," Geens surmised, "data intended for the China map must have ended up in the global map." Was it all simply the result of an ill-fated drag-and-drop? Whatever exactly may have occurred, the whole episode illustrated the perils of geopolitics in the age of neogeography.

Just five years since the release of Google Maps and Google Earth, the corporation may well be the world's most important mapmaker. More than 600...