The purpose is to have a Schelling point that bypasses any tedious weeks-long arguments. Otherwise your Frankfurt datacenter gets named "ceurope" because the London datacenter got "europe" first, or you named the Ohio datacenter "east" and there's a fight about whether to call the new Virginia datacenter "easter".

[0] If you're building a submerged datacenter in the middle of the Atlantic then ... well, do your best.