Yes, I know you're jumping on the "corporations have too much power" bandwagon, but here I don't think it makes any sense.

Perhaps avoiding taking a stance could take the form of following the current practice of major players (UN and others)...?

Many languages have different names across populations. And people strongly identify to a specific nomenclature.

Also, many people speak multiple languages, languages that cross disputed borders, and languages spoken only by populations that want independence from the current states where they're located (e.g. Basque).

And while political boundaries are messy, language boundaries are even more so. How do you decide dialect boundaries? And once you do, how do you decide which dialects get separate domains?

Sounds like this was the less political choice, really.

Their reasoning (following the example of multiple international organisations - including the UN, ICANN, and ISO) is sound.

Imagine making a desktop environment and e.g. showing a world map to select your time zone.

Or having a list of countries & regions to assist the user with localization. Seemingly any list of countries you show will "make a political statement" to someone out there. KDE, for example, had many bugs filed about the naming used for what the ISO calls the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macedonia_naming_dispute

http://www.iso.org/iso/home/standards/country_codes/country_...

When it comes to Israel/Palestine, every mapmaker in the world is taking a stance.

Every possible choice of wording for anything having to do with the area of land bounded by the Mediterranean Sea, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt involves taking a stance on a contentious political issue.

I don't think corporations (or anyone else) should avoid making such choices because they inherently require taking such a stance, nor do I think that they should avoid changing such choices because of that.

Edited: Turkey -> Lebanon

Talk about messy...