Аннотация:From the onset of plate tectonics, the existence of most of the plates was never put in doubt, although the boundaries of some plates, like Africa, were later revised. There are however, two microplates in northeast Asia, the Amurian and Okhotsk, whose existence and the sense of rotation was revised several times. The rms value of plate-residual GPS velocities is 0.5-0.9 mm/a for sets of stations representing the motion of the following plates: Antarctic, Australian, Eurasian, North American, Nubian, Pacific, and South American. This value can be regarded as an upper bound on deviation of real plates from infinite stiffness. The rms value of plate-residual GPS velocities is 1.2-1.8 mm/a for the Indian, Nazca, and Somalian plates. Higher rms values for India and Nazca are attributed to the noisier data. The higher rms value for Somalia appears to arise from the distributed deformation to the east of the East African Rift; whether this statement is true can only be decided from observations of denser network in the future. From the analysis of plate-residual GPS velocities, the Canadian Arctic and northeastern Siberia belong to the North American plate. The detailed GPS survey on Sakhalin Island shows that the Sea of Okhotsk region also belongs to the North American plate while the region to the west of it belongs to the Eurasian plate. These results provide a constraint on the geometry of the North American plate and put in doubt the existence of smaller plates in northeast Asia.