The projection argument in a charting config gets typed once, during a sprint, by someone who is not thinking about Togo. It stays unread until an outside document names it.
Two different products get called a map, and they carry different obligations. One routes a driver and zooms to a street corner. Mercator earned that job honestly: it renders circles of latitude and meridians of longitude as straight lines and it preserves angles, which is what navigators needed when it was devised in the 16th century and what made it attractive to Google and others assembling mapping services centuries later [7][8]. The other product is a picture of the world sitting still, a coverage map or the revenue-by-country choropleth on an all-hands slide. It has no navigational job at all, and it is where Mercator's documented distortion does the damage: landmasses toward the poles read larger than they are, while those near the equator read smaller [9]. Gizmodo lists the inflated group as North America, Europe and Russia, and the diminished group as Central and South America, the Indian subcontinent, southern and central Asia, and Africa [10]. African countries have objected to that treatment of the continent for years [14].
The replacement on offer is a 2017 design, distinct from the 1970s classroom poster. Equal Earth was created in 2017 specifically to depict relative areas better than Gall-Peters, the older equal-area projection [5], which puts roughly five centuries between the two options a team is now choosing between [13].
This carries no compliance weight. The resolution binds nobody, and Gizmodo's read is that its force runs entirely through pressure on publishers and tech companies [2]. What exists is a citable request with a national sponsor, an African Union endorsement, and, according to Reuters, exactly one country on record against it [3]. That combination turns up in a partner review or a procurement questionnaire, not in a filing.
The reason to expect movement anyway is what the same season showed about how map defaults actually get set. Gizmodo describes Google and Apple as rushing to implement Trump's attempt to redraw the map around Lake Ontario [11]. That is data, not scandal: geographic labels at the two largest consumer map vendors move on political request, quickly, when the requester matters commercially. The UN request arrives with better arithmetic behind it and far less leverage.
So sort the map surfaces you own on two questions. Does anyone measure or navigate on this one, and does anyone outside the company compare areas on it. Measure-and-navigate surfaces keep Web Mercator, because the resolution offers a delivery driver nothing, and even Gizmodo grants that the conformal, north-preserving behavior is useful at small scales [12]. Compare surfaces move to Equal Earth, and the work there is a re-export and a design system asset, not a migration. The mixed cell, the interactive world dashboard, is where the argument will actually happen, and the workable answer is to switch by zoom: equal area at world view, Mercator once someone is looking at a city.
The evidence says nothing about whether users notice a projection change, and no retention or usage-depth number is going to arrive to settle it. That leaves the choice resting on what each map is for.
