Google Maps turns Lake Ontario into ‘Lake America’, just like Trump wants

Following an order from the US President, Google quickly renamed Lake Ontario on the border between the US and Canada using the Maps mapping service. Now, as Trump decreed, it is listed as “Lake America.”

Google reacted quickly to Trump’s decree

The Internet company Google reacted surprisingly quickly to an “executive order” announced last week by US President Trump, according to which the US government authorities must now refer to Lake Ontario on the border with Canada as “Lake America”. Since the weekend, Google Maps users in the USA have only been shown the name preferred by the current US President. In Canada the lake is called Lake Ontario. In Europe and other regions of the world, however, there is also a kind of renaming in which, on the one hand, Lake Ontario is mentioned, but on the other hand, the addition Lake America is given in brackets.

Trump wants to provoke Canadians in the customs dispute

Trump made the renaming as a kind of provocation to annoy the US’s Canadian neighbors, or at least that was the general perception of the unexpected step. The US President had previously had the Gulf of Mexico renamed the “Gulf of America” and thus also caused a stir. He recently said that we now have a gulf and a lake, so all we need now is an ocean.

The company justifies the fact that Google renamed Lake Ontario on Google Maps at very short notice by saying that when naming places or other things in the map service, they follow the specifications of the US GNIS (Geographic Names Information System). The GNIS is operated by the US Geological Survey, the agency responsible for official cartography, which in turn is subordinate to the Department of the Interior. As a result of the executive order from the White House, the GNIS was recently immediately updated with the new naming convention for Lake Ontario. In a short Blog entry Google justified the renaming of the lake in the USA with government regulations, but this also attracted some anger from many users. US citizens who are not fans of the current president see the renaming as an attempt by Google to curry favor. Some users announced that they would prefer to use competitor MapQuest’s software instead of Google Maps in the future.

Unfortunately, the latter is not officially available for Android in Germany. In Apple’s map service, the name of Lake Ontario has not yet changed. The likelihood that Apple will follow suit in the coming days is quite high, as the company also renamed the Gulf of Mexico as Google a few days later in accordance with the wishes of the US President. In this country, “Lake Ontario” is currently still listed under Google Maps in both the browser and the app names used for over 400 years led. According to Google’s blog entry, this could change shortly as mentioned.